The speeds you’ll need by 2025
You might not need gigabit broadband yet, but the government is quite keen that you should have it. Part of its so-called levelling-up agenda involves “working with industry to target a minimum of 85% gigabitcapable coverage by 2025”. (Yes, the government has set ambitious broadband targets before that it’s conspicuously failed to achieve, but let’s not dive down that rabbit hole.)
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport outlined its plans for “Project Gigabit” last summer, and that 46-page document included some interesting projections on precisely what we’re going to need gigabit broadband for by 2025. The figures below were collated by Ofcom, in association with a consultancy firm called WIK.
Make of these categories and projections (in Mbits/sec) what you will, but they are partly being used to justify spending public money on accelerating the rollout of gigabit broadband.
“Based on WIK’s modelling of expected demand for current and future consumer and business applications in the home, we estimate that around 40% of UK households may require at least 1Gbit/sec downstream and 600Mbits/sec upstream by 2025, with more than 40% having demand for at least 300Mbits/sec symmetric,” the report stated.
“Even under a less aggressive scenario, in which forecast bandwidth for some services are reduced, and we assume there is no use of advanced media such as 8K and VR (except for gaming). We estimate that more than 50% of households would still require download speeds of at least 300Mbits/sec by 2025 of which 8% would require gigabit bandwidths.”