The UK Government intends to introduce a broadband universal service obligation (USO) that would give everyone a right to a decent broadband connection on reasonable request. This is in recognition of the increasing importance of broadband to people’s everyday lives.
In March, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport wrote to Ofcom requesting technical advice and recommendations on the design of the broadband USO. We published a call for inputs in April, seeking views from consumers and industry on the broadband USO design. We received 115 responses from a wide variety of stakeholders, which we have taken into account when developing our advice to Government. We published a report summarising these responses in August.
This statement sets out our advice to Government on how to achieve a decent broadband connection for all. We have set out a range of options for Government to decide which best meets its objectives.
We have published an update to the estimated costs of the different broadband scenarios. There have been two main changes since the report and addendum submitted to Government in December 2016: an additional broadband USO scenario and correction of modelling error for LR-VDSL. As a result of these changes, we have updated the relevant tables from the December Report. These tables can be found in the update document.
As stated in the December Report, the objective of this modelling work has not been to give a precise figure for each of the scenarios examined. Instead, these figures represent preliminary estimates of the order of magnitude of each scenario’s cost, and what drives those costs, to inform policy development.
Updated cost estimates (PDF, 835.0 KB)
