UK Broadband providers

UK broadband providers never had it so good. Broadband or high speed Internet is spreading across the country fast, as more and more people are realizing the advantages of it over simple dial up connections. As a result, the service providers are having their hands full with their subscriber lists going up every month.

In fact, according to the latest figures, there are almost 4 million broadband connections in the UK alone, with 15% of homes already using broadband connections to go online.

Here is the data:

• 64% of UK adults have a PC at home
• 53% of UK adults have Internet access at home. In figure terms, this would mean 13 million homes.
• The percentage of homes having broadband is 15%.
• 68% of small businesses have Internet access.
• The total number of broadband connections is 3.99 million.
• 2.45 million DSL connections.
• 1.54 million cable modem connections.
• 84% of UK homes and businesses subscribe to DSL services.

Here are the largest UK broadband providers

Wanadoo broadband
• BT broadband
• NTL broadband
• One-Tel broadband
• Virgin broadband
• Tiscali broadband
• Pipex broadband
• AOL broadband

Government broadband targets

The government is constantly monitoring the growth of the sector and does not want to fall behind other developed countries. In this, the government is going all out to support the operations and the growth of the UK broadband service providers to ease their hurdles and make them financially worthwhile.

In fact, the government?s target is quite ambitious. It wants the UK to have the most extensive and competitive broadband market in the G7 by 2005. The DTI measures the progress every 6 months based on an index that has been developed jointly by the government and the Broadband Stakeholders Group or BSG. Continuously monitoring the path to reach this goal, a report was published on the progress at the end of 2003. At that time, UK was joint 6th in the G7 with Italy.