A study by Cisco indentifying those countries that were ready for the future of broadband has placed the UK in 25th position, behind countries such as Bulgaria and Latvia. Listing 66 countries, the research found that only nine countries were ready for broadband’s future high speed, high data streaming needs.
Making the list for “meeting needs for today”, the UK was said to be coping with the current demand of the modern world. Cisco’s communication manager Joanne Hughes said “It can be a bit misleading to look at the rankings. The important thing is whether the broadband quality of a country is good enough for today’s needs and the UK falls well within this category. We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focusing on next generation access.”
Japan and South Korea dominated the upper levels of the table. This is largely due to their ongoing commitment to providing high speeds, with South Korea in particular pledging 1Gbps to users by 2012.
Looking at the future demands of broadband, which includes high data streaming due to applications such as YouTube, Skype and varying on-demand content devices, the report discovered that of 66 countries, two thirds were coping with today’s needs. However, only nine countries including Latvia and Sweden were ready for the future use.
Based on speed tests across the 66 countries, some 24 million cases were recorded. Investigating upload and download speeds, and the delay seen within a network, the UK came 31st. Ms Hughes said “Most studies are based just on broadband penetration or, if they look at speed they look at advertised speeds rather than real speeds. We wanted to look at the issue of broadband quality which is vital as new applications come along. We also looked at broadband penetration because there is no point having good quality networks if they are not widely available.”
