Offline Households within Library Catchments

On 17th September 2015 I was invited to attend a meeting of the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) for Digital Champions in Libraries.

Public Libraries are often expected to "fill the gaps" in access to Digital Communcations left by market forces and subsequent "gap funding" of BT by Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK). I presented the results of an analysis intended to quantify the remaining gaps within the catchment of each Scottish Library.

On this page, the slides I presented are supplemented by a more detailed presentation of the results. This work may be quoted, reused, and adapted under a CC-by licence.

We have combined Ofcom data showing the number of broadband connections in each postcode with data from the Scottish Government's Information Services Division, giving numbers of households in each postcode, to compute the number of offline households within the catchment area of each Library.

Catchments are computed by assuming that households in each postcode are served by the nearest library. There are around 750,000 offline households in Scotland, and around 500 libraries. On average, each library serves roughly 1,500 offline households. However, over 50 libraries cater for at least double this number. Our first diagram is a histogram showing how the offline households are distributed across libraries.

For example, four libraries have fewer than 200 offline households in their catchment area, sixty-four libraries each serve between 600 and 800 offline households. Four libraries serve more than four times the average number of offline households.

If a library serves 5,200 offline households, as some do, and the average household requires one hour online per month, then the library must provide 1,200 hours of internet access per week, or 30 terminals if each is used for 40 hours per week.

In practice, a deprived household may require much more than one hour of internet access per month.

• A CAS Scotland report, Offline and left behind, by Sarah Beattie-Smith, highlighted the essential role internet access plays in access to both jobs and benefits.
• The average adult (16+) Scottish Internet user spends over 50 hours per month online at home, plus a further 30 hours elsewhere (Ofcom CMR 2015).

Caveats

The data provided by Ofcom undercounts connections in two ways.

• First, for postcodes with fewer than 4 premises no data is released. These postcodes account for almost 5% of the households in Scotland. For each library we show, in the "No Data" column, the number of households in postcodes for which Ofcom provides no data.
• Second, only connections provided by the major providers, accounting for roughly 90% of connections, are counted. Provision by small ISPs and community networks is not counted.

If we optimistically assume that every households in postcodes with few households, the overall numbers of disconnected households may be as much as 15% lower than those given in the table.

However, even if we take this optimistic estimate of the undercounting, this analysis suggest that several libraries must serve more than 5,000 disconnected households.

Furthermore, our figures for the number of households offline are computed, for each postcode where Ofcom provides data, by subtracting the number of connections reported by Ofcom from the number of households reported in the ISD data. Some of these connections will serve business premises, so the number of housholds not served by the major providers will be undercounted. (In postcodes where there are more connections than housholds, we count zero households offline.)

Local knowledge is required to determine where provision by small ISPs and community networks may be significant.

Offline Households in Scottish Library Catchments, a work by Michael P. Fourman, published online at http://http://idea.ed.ac.uk/digiscot/SLIC/, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Last modified: Fri Oct 16 12:34:28 BST 2015