In 2011, the Right Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP passed down a mandate that the UK should have the best average connection speeds in Europe. This mandate was handed to BT to make the UK’s broadband infrastructure more robust and able to cope with the future demand. This is due to be completed in 2015.
A report produced by Offcom in August 2013 shows that great improvement has been made already. The government mandate also included a promise to increase speeds in both rural and remote rural areas.
As of August 2013 the UK average connection speed is 14.7 meg. Here are some more statistics broken down into areas:
City = 26.4 meg average
Suburban = 17.9 meg average
Rural = 9.9 meg average
Remote Rural = 4.4 meg average
As you can see the figures for rural and remote rural areas have increased heavily, this is because of the 4 initial pilot schemes launched in certain areas between 2011 and 2013, many more schemes will roll out between now and 2015.
With 20% of the UK now getting more than 10 meg and 73% getting more than 4meg this means that the possibilities open to businesses all over the UK have drastically improved since 2011.
Remote Desktop Connection speeds
We are often asked how a certain internet speed will perform using an RDP connection to a hosted service so we have compiled some data based on a Microsoft white paper from 2008. Although internet speeds have soared since 2008 the bandwidth usage per user has remained the same.
You can see from the data below that this enables companies of all sizes to utilise a hosted service and for the small percentage of the UK businesses that still don’t achieve connection speeds over 4 meg the potential is there to support 20+ users at the same time. This means that many small companies which would expect to be precluded from services of this nature can actually make full use of them reap the benefits of reduced IT costs.
RDP use
Full powerpoint presentation (moving images, transitions and high colour gradients)
- Bandwidth use approx 119.4Kbps
- 4MB Connection speed will support approx 33.5 users
Basic powerpoint presentation (slideshow, mostly text)
- Bandwidth use approx 56.8Kbps
- 4MB Connection speed will support approx 70 users
Typing and scrolling (looking through word docs or excel spread sheets and entering data)
- Bandwidth use approx 20.2Kbps
- 4MB Connection speed will support approx 198 users
Internet Explorer (Browsing multiple web pages containing images, text and diagrams)
- Bandwidth use approx 90.47Kbps
- 4MB Connection speed will support approx 44.2 users
