More than 90 percent of UK’s fixed lines meet the challenges of working from home

Aachen, July 17, 2020 – We have analysed the fixed lines of the United Kingdom with regards to network performance. The study’s findings include: In most households, the speeds are perfectly adequate for a large part of the existing video conferencing applications. Only one in ten connections face limitations when consumers use them to work from home. Only, when video platforms are used in addition to other applications when working from home, there are some restrictions. However, problems with the connection can be often traced back to shared connections or the terminal device itself. Also, no obvious differences between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland could be identified.

Our benchmarking methodology focuses on customer-perceived network quality and covers a wide range of fixed and mobile services – it is widely regarded as the de-facto industry standard.

The Covid-19 virus has contributed to the fact that more and more people work from home – thus accelerating the digitisation of the world of work. It can be assumed that working from home will increasingly have its place in the world of work. It is therefore interesting to see whether internet speeds in households are sufficient to connect via video conferencing with colleagues and customers worldwide. To answer this question, we have examined more than 345,000 broadband lines and over 70 million samples in the UK with its proven crowdsourcing approach between March and May 2020. In this way, the fixed network’s speed can be indirectly determined with the help of our anonymised data, when smartphone users are connected to their home via WiFi.

Our findings are: Over 97 percent of the lines provide at least SD quality (0.6 Mbit/s) - the minimum requirement for a video chat. By default, however, video conferences take place in HD quality (1.5 Mbit/s) or HQHD quality (3Mbit/s). After all, around 90 percent of the connections are capable of providing the requirement for a video chat – throughout the UK. It becomes more difficult, if video platforms with UHD streaming (15Mbit/s) are used when working from home. Still, more than half of the connections are capable to support UHD streaming. England comes out best with just under 56 percent of UHD-capable connections, last is Northern Ireland with 54 per cent of UHD-capable connections.

Hakan Ekmen, CEO of umlaut Telecommunication, comments: “Overall, the results of our crowd-based evaluation of fixed lines in the UK are encouraging. More than 90 percent of the lines in the UK have easily met the challenges of working from home. We only see restrictions when video platforms with UHD streaming are used in addition to video conferencing.”

We evaluate the mobile and fixed-line networks in more than 120 countries. The company’s methodology allows a technical analysis that is unprecedented in its level of detail and enables comparisons between the performance and capability of each network. umlaut’s public benchmarks as well as its certificate benchmarks help network operators and providers to demonstrate how well they are delivering wireless connections to consumers, business users and enterprises while revealing the areas of improvement.