Quicker to send data by bike than email in London, MP reveals

London has the worst broadband services in all of the UK, new research has revealed.

According to official figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) large swathes of the capital city are lacking access to superfast broadband. The issue has been particularly highlighted around Tech City, the area in east London that has seen a boom in technology start-up companies in recent years, the vast majority of which rely heavily on fast and reliable internet to remain competitive.

Despite the government's £1.7 billion investment in extending Britain’s internet infrastructure to under-served areas, it has stated that constituencies in London and Hull will still languish at the bottom of the league table once the improvements are completed by 2017. The department says that this is because it is unable to directly invest in those areas because competition rules prevent state intervention.

The Cities of London and Westminster are the areas worst affected in the capital, with only 31 per cent of premises having access to super-fast connections, defined as those with speeds above 24 megabits a second.

To illustrate the extent of the problem, the House of Commons has been told by Labour MP Emily Thornberry of how staff at Proudfoot, a digital content provider in St John Street, London, have actually started to send information by bicycle rather than rely on the internet. She said that the company's employees get on their bikes to transport footage to nearby Covent Garden in 15 minutes rather than taking an hour or two to upload the material and send it using broadband.

A DCMS spokesperson said: “State aid rules ensure government only builds network where the commercial sector won’t go ... We are already reviewing what we can do for residents in those areas the market won’t reach as part of our commitment to take super-fast broadband to the final five per cent.

“In order to drive the economy we have already seen over 8,000 businesses in UK cities benefit from faster and better broadband as part of our successful connection voucher scheme.”

Businesses struggling with the performance of their existing network could consider setting up a leased line or MPLS network for fast, reliable internet speeds.