It's all well and good that 96% of the country has 30 Mbps coverage but for most people that's just about all they're going to get as 40% have no coverage for >

It's all well and good that 96% of the country has 30 Mbps coverage but for most people that's just about all they're going to get as 40% have no coverage for >100 Mbps, i.e., BT (or BT reseller) customers limited to a maximum of 76 Mbps with no Cable availability. As a metric average speed has issues as it can translate to how much people are willing to pay as opposed to what's available but it's still useful to look at here - 46 Mbps for the country, but that's driven mostly by Cable which has an average speed of 92 Mbps while Openreach sits at 30 Mbps, it's easy to speculate that BT are more interested in hitting government targets while Virgin are providing some competition that is so desperately needed. As far as new and exciting applications for gigabit or at least fibre goes it needs to be wide spread and cheap enough for those opportunities to come to fruition and neither of those are really true, it's no good asking an average member of the public to pay £62 a month for a 500/35 Virgin broadband only plan or £58 and £68 respectively for a 500/75 or 900/110 BT broadband plan and expecting much to come of it when less than 20% of the population has such coverage. For a price comparison hyperoptic is £60 for 900/1000 and B4rn £30 for 1000/1000 - you should note both of these providers offer gigabit upload as well which goes a long way towards providing opportunities. The average upload of the country has only just inched to 10 Mbps after it was a mere 5 Mbps 3 years ago with many Virgin customers on the less expensive plans being stuck on 2/3 Mbps. The UK has incredibly good coverage and the minimum service is relatively decent all things considered but the average service is still behind other European countries, with countries like Sweden and Switzerland being better on price while being substantially faster and more comparable countries like France and Spain still being cheaper while being slightly faster.