Broadband is the one utility people now check before they view, which is progress. It is also the one where the published figure and your actual experience part company most often, and the reason is in how the figure is built.
Coverage is a share of premises
Ofcom publishes availability as the percentage of premises in an area that can order a given speed. A postcode showing 98% for superfast is saying that almost every address on it can get superfast. It is not saying yours can.
Somebody is always in the remainder, and it is usually predictable who: a converted flat on a shared line, a property at the far end of a long copper run, a new build connected before the street was upgraded. If the figure is anything short of 100%, the only way to know which side of it you are on is to check the specific address.
Two things have been called fibre for ten years
Full fibre runs an optical fibre to the building. Speed barely degrades with distance, upload is usually close to download, and it is the product worth paying for.
The older product runs fibre to a green cabinet in the street and copper for the last stretch. It was marketed as fibre for years and it works perfectly well, but the speed depends on how far you are from that cabinet. Two houses on the same street with the same advertised package can get noticeably different speeds.
Our area report shows the share of premises able to get gigabit and superfast services separately, so you can see which kind of coverage an area actually has rather than one blended figure. Across the postcodes we hold that is 1,737,468 postcode records.
Upload is the number that matters now
Download speed sells packages. Upload speed decides whether a video call holds up while somebody else in the house is also on one. On the older copper-tail products upload is a small fraction of download, and that asymmetry is what people are actually experiencing when they say the connection is fine but calls keep freezing.
If you work from home, find the upload figure before you sign anything. It is published; it is just never the headline.
What to do on the viewing
Ask what the current occupant has and what they actually get. Ask whether anyone has had full fibre installed on the street. Look for the small green cabinets nearby, and for the signs of a recent build — new tarmac patches down one side of the road are often the trace of a fibre installation.
Then put the exact address, not the postcode, into two or three provider checkers before exchange. Area-level data is for building a shortlist. Address-level checks are for deciding.
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