Ofcom analyses consumer access and take-up

Here Ofcom discusses all the communications services that are available across the UK. Ofcom also deal with the trends of the consumers in choosing communications services and their reasons for and against selecting specific services.

Ofcom has divided the reasons for not taking-up certain services in to categories namely “voluntary” and “Involuntary”. When the consumer takes a positive decision not to take-up a particular service, it is a voluntary decision. On the other hand if the customer is some how prevented from taking a particular service/technology, say its price is high, then it is “Involuntary”.

By using four metrics, consumer access and their selection can be measured. They are the availability of all the communications services, adoption of communications services, non-ownership of communications services and the level of difficulty in the usage of technology.

The findings in the report are analysed by a number of demographic groups. These groups are age, urbanity, socio-economic group and gender. Only when the differences are significant, sub-group differences are noted.

The first metric used to measure consumer access and take up is the availability of services like fixed lines, digital television, internet including fixed broadband etc across the UK. Ofcom and operators were the sources of data for this purpose. During the last three years, the overall availability of communications services in the UK was high and has not changed. In the UK, almost all households have access to key broadcasting and telephony services. All consumers are covered by broadband and digital broadcasting, and fixed lines. To calculate the availability of mobile 2G and 3G communications, the methodology used by operators has been changed since 2010. Hence it is not possible to make a direct comparison with previous year’s data. 98.9% of households in the UK are covered by 3G mobile services and 99.9% by second generation (2G).

Across the UK, Fixed-line services continue to be universally available. In Hull, the universal service obligation (USO) is made available by BT and Kingston Communications. For a standard charge, all the households in the UK, will have the right to have access to a fixed line. When houses in the remote areas where installation cost of the supplier increase over 3,400 Pounds, are to be connected, additional connection charges would be collected.

Availability of Mobile
The data on predicted mobile signal strength of both 2G and 3G networks in the UK was collected by Ofcom’s Infrastructure Report and calculated two measures of coverage. Measure one considered the “premises coverage” meaning the proportion of postal addresses within the coverage of the networks and the second measure considered “geographic coverage”. In the ‘geographic coverage’, the percentage of land mass covered is taken into consideration. The signal strength that is sufficient to make or receive a call outdoors was the basis of Ofcoms analysis.

Elsewhere, there are other mobile coverage projects like OpenSignalMap and BBC’s mobile coverage research. To measure mobile coverage both of them use consumer end device.

Availability of internet
The source of data is Ofcom’s Infrastructure Report. For consumers, now there are a number of broadband providers to choose from. Consumers have a wide choice of purchasing options, access platforms and broadband products. As the availability of combination of local loop unbundling, (LLU), the wireless broadband market, cable operators, and mobile broadband services is increasing in the communications market, consumers enjoy more and more of purchasing options, access platforms and broadband products.

A growth in the availability of unbundled local loop lines is observed. At the end of the year 2007 availability was 80% whereas at the year-end 2010 it was 85%. At 99.98%, the ADSL availability remained unchanged but the cable availability fell by 1% due to an increase in the number of households. Anyway the availability of ADSL to individual household is subject to the local factors like the distance from the exchange, the quality of local networks etc.

Availability of digital television
To receive live broadcast-quality television, the viewers in the UK, have four types of digital distribution technology. They are cable, satellite, digital terrestrial and IPTV – which have varying levels of availability. The digital TV services have the highest availability. Digital satellite is having near-universal coverage of 98% followed by DTT (Digital Terrestrial) with 85% availability and as the digital switchover progresses the percentage is rising. Last year, the DTT availability percentage was 81. During Q1 2011, cable coverage stood at 48%. Availability of digital terrestrial television is calculated on the basis of the households that can now receive at least 17 channels.

92.2% of the UK households have DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) coverage provided by BBC. For 84.6% household’s commercial national DAB radio is available and local DAB radio is available to 66.2%.