Respectfully, I find the 70% figure for access to a gigabit line extremely hard to believe.

When I lived in central London (tube zone 2), all that was available at my address was a wet-noodle quality 20 Mbps DSL connection. No BT FTTP, no Virgin, no Hyperoptic, no G.Network. This was in early 2022.

I now live in Switzerland and have a 25 Gbps FTTP connection, paying about 30% more than I paid in London for the DSL line.

It's a completely different world connectivity-wise.

The 70% figure is very recent and largely due to Virgin Media doing a massive upgrade. It surprised me too.

FWIW last time I checked, central London did indeed have slow connectivity, but it didn't extrapolate to the rest of the UK. No idea why the center of the capital was equivalent to a remote small town in this regard.

I agree, that's very counterintuitive. You'd think the economics would generally be in London's favour, given the high population density. (Though digging up the streets might be harder and therefore more expensive?)

Well i clearly couldnt find such homes and believe me i looked. I was happy to have found homes with proper structural integrity let alone high speed internet.