Global broadband reliability gets consistently higher

Urban households worldwide have access to better broadband infrastructure, higher-speed tiers and newer equipment, while fixed broadband reliability in urban areas of middle-income countries such as Chile and Poland surpasses rural reliability in many high-income countries, according to a study from Opensignal.

Bridging the digital divide: unlocking reliable broadband for all used Opensignal’s new broadband reliability experience metric to assess users’ real-world fixed broadband experience across 18 countries.

The metric measures the entire user experience, from establishing a connection to successfully completing tasks such as streaming video, browsing the web and scrolling through social media. By examining countries with varying income levels and characteristics, it explored the differences in broadband reliability between urban and rural areas using a 100-1,000 point scale, measuring broadband experience in a typical household where multiple devices are used simultaneously.

The higher scores on the scale indicate better reliability experience based on three main components: connectivity, measuring the household’s ability to connect to the internet; completion,  measuring the ability to complete typical tasks and ensure that the established connection is maintained; and sufficiency, looking at how tasks are performed sufficiently well, including speed thresholds, latency thresholds, jitter, and other technical components. It stressed that the connectivity component of the score captures the proportion of times when households don’t have internet access.

The standout finding of the study was that reliability is top of mind for consumers and that consumers consider more than just download speed or price when choosing a broadband package.

Urban reliability was shown to be getting consistently higher through increased access to better infrastructure, while income levels in the 18 countries surveyed were less predictive of reliability than density. 

Looking through the lens of reliability – defined as the ability to perform typical household tasks – the report segmented countries in the analysis into three broad buckets: higher reliability (overall score above 650) in Sweden, Norway, the UK Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the US; moderate reliability (500-650) in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Spain, Italy, Poland and Brazil; and lower reliability (under 500) for India, Colombia, Mexico, Philippines and Indonesia.

Unsurprisingly, the study showed wealthier countries tended to have better reliability. However, Opensignal cautioned that the correlation is not strong, indicating that other factors were also influential, such as regulatory frameworks and competition. Broadband reliability experience was on average 23% higher in urban areas than in rural areas across all markets analysed.

Among the reasons for this were that urban subscribers benefit from superior underlying infrastructure, such as roads, power supply and utility services, which can be used to deploy broadband networks more efficiently. Urban areas also typically have a higher concentration of people and households, making it economically viable for service providers to invest in and maintain high-quality broadband infrastructure.

The study also found that network infrastructure sharing is not associated with high reliability or a narrow digital divide. Countries with limited infrastructure sharing but targeted subsidies for private rural investment mostly perform better than those relying on widespread infrastructure sharing.

Topography and density were key factors in generating broadband digital divides. Markets with highly concentrated populations in urban areas show small gaps between urban and rural reliability, and spread-out middle-income countries with difficult terrain show big gaps. But Opensignal observed that a few countries with lots of medium-density areas, like the US and Spain, have relatively small digital divides.