Ofcom UK Scrap Worldwide Broadband Scorecard Comparability

The telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has quietly scrapped one other fastened broadband associated efficiency report – this time it’s their annual worldwide comparability, which pits the UK’s broadband and cellular connectivity towards the EU’s main economies (France, Germany, Spain and Italy and so forth.) and another massive nations.

Ofcom has been publishing the Worldwide Broadband Scorecard since 2013, which examined varied connectivity metrics like community availability, take-up, use and costs of fastened and cellular broadband efficiency throughout nations for the aim of measuring and evaluating towards the UK’s relative efficiency.

The non-UK knowledge for these studies was usually sourced from a third-party supplier (Omdia-Informa Tech), which was appointed following a aggressive tender course of. However the regulator has determined that as worldwide knowledge is on the market from Omdia-Informa Tech and related telecoms analysis corporations (albeit for a charge), “it’s [our] view that stopping the publication of the Worldwide Broadband Scorecard won’t hinder stakeholders’ potential to benchmark the UK broadband market internationally.”

In our view the transfer, which seems like one other cost-cutting measure, is considerably of a damaging because it did present a helpful level of annual comparability. Then again, Ofcom weren’t significantly good at selling the studies, which frequently ended up being hidden away as an editorial footnote (we missed this 12 months’s report for exactly this cause – it was by no means noticed).

The excellent news is that the European Fee does nonetheless publish a fairly wide-ranging annual report (right here), which can be utilized to assist evaluate the UK with at the very least the EU states. In any other case, a abstract of Ofcom’s ultimate 2023 scorecard may be seen under, or you may take a look at the interactive report on-line. However a lot of the info is from late 2022, which is kind of outdated (a typical downside when attempting to do any massive worldwide comparability).

UK Abstract Desk