How good is your town's broadband?

The availability of broadband has been a significant issue for many UK districts and regions ever since it started to roll out. But although there are important differences between areas the picture has been fairly static for the last few years.

Now the promise of £530m in UK government funding over the period of the October 2010 Spending Review provides an opportunity for anyone who wants to improve local broadband infrastructure. The money is much less than the £2 billion foreseen under the previous government's scheme. It will not be nearly enough to achieve the objective of 2Mbps broadband for virtually everyone. But it is still a lot of money. Public and private sector players need to grasp the opportunity and make the best of it where they can.

Here, as a first step towards understanding what is needed, Point Topic compares the coverage and quality of broadband access infrastructure across the local authorities of the UK. We look at different measures of access network infrastructure and combine them in a single "broadband infrastructure index" which provides a simple way of comparing the overall situation in different areas. The data is all drawn from Point Topic's "BroadBand Layer" database of availability and take-up estimates for every postcode in the UK, using the new V12 edition of the BroadBand Layer.