Broadband availability

Ofcom data showing broadband availability and average speeds in North East LEP and comparator geographies

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Broadband Accessibility and Speeds

This section shows the coverage of broadband at different speeds. Almost all internal spaces can access Superfast broadband, which conversely is the slowest broadband speed now measured. In speed order, other broadband speeds are categorised as Ultrasfast broadband, Gigabit, and Full Fibre. The latter two are normally not required for private residences, and Ultrasfast broadband is only needed where there are multiple online users with data intense requirements. 


The latest broadband data

At Spring 2023, 96.7% of all premises in the North East LEP area had at least a superfast broadband (SFBB) connection or faster. This value is broadly the same within England excluding London which has 96.6% of premises connected to an SFBB connection or faster. Premises in England excluding London on average have faster connections, with 72.0% of premises having at least an ultrafast broadband speed (UFBB) compared to 67.4% in the North East. The same trend occurs for Gigabit and Full Fiber speed connections; in the North East the percentage of households with a connection at least that fast were 66.4% and 41.6% respectively.

Average regional broadband speeds across the past seven years show significant improvements across the last two years from December 2020 to December 2022. Average broadband speeds have more than doubled for all regions shown apart from London (which has still seen large increases). The North East area average broadband speeds increased from 47.6 mbits/s to over 100 during this time period and overtook the North West average speeds in 2021.

There have been increases in average broadband speeds across in areas. County Durham saw the largest increases in average broadband speeds between 2021 and 2022 and the smallest increase in North East LEP LAs was in Northumberland which had the slowest average broadband speeds by a considerable margin in 2022. 

The statistics are based on Ofcom collected data.


The latest mobile data

At Spring 2023, 89.1% of indoor spaces had 4G coverage from all the four major mobile data providers. This was an increase of 1.7pp from Spring 2022. This value is much higher than in England excluding London  where the coverage was 81.6% in 2023.

All LEP areas saw an increase in indoor 4G coverage with the largest increases in Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region. North East LEP LAs generally had increases in 4G coverage, although Gateshead and North Tynesdie did have marginal decreases in coverage.

The statistics are based on Ofcom collected data.

Mobile 4G Data Coverage in Geographical Areas