The UK’s unlikely smart home hotspots

With the Smart Home Market set to reach a value of £127 billion by 2026, we've looked at where across the UK home buyers can get an affordable foot on the ladder with the best broadband connectivity to keep their smart home running.

Smart homes have been labelled as the ‘new tech gold rush’, taking over from the smartphone and featuring heavily at this year Consumer Electronics Show. With everything from TVs, doorbells, locks, home assistants like Alexa, cooking aids, sleep aids, energy appliances and more, our households are set to become a lot more tech-enabled.

Of course, it’s still early days and it may be a while before our homes become fully functioning extensions of our smartphones, but whether you’re streaming a film on Netflix or trying to remotely answer your door (and everything in between), your home is only likely to be as smart as the broadband available in your area.

We looked at the top 50 areas across the UK for broadband speed before comparing this speed with the average house price in each area, ranking them based on the house price cost for every megabit per second to highlight where offers the optimum mix of initial affordability and smooth smart home potential.

With a UK average speed of just 17.8, the average home buyer pays £12,983 in property prices for every megabit per second of broadband. But for those keen to join the smart home revolution, there are some far more affordable options, with much better broadband speeds.

Blaenau Gwent is home to a broadband speed of 25.4mbps and with the average home costing just £92,515, the area is the nation’s top contender for a smart home hotspot at just £3,642 per Mbps.

Middlesbrough (£4,258), Dundee (£4,418), North Lanarkshire (£4,565), Hartlepool (£4,585) North East Lincolnshire (£4,620), Halton (£5,421), Belfast (£5,545) and Darlington (£5,684) also make the top 10.

Founder and CEO of Yomdel, Andy Soloman, commented:

“Consumers crave convenience and it’s clear that the further integration of this convenience into our day to day lives and our homes is going to be a huge area of focus and development over the coming years.

Previous research has demonstrated that current connectivity in many areas of the UK is below par, to say the least, so it’s likely that it will take some time for the ground level infrastructure to catch up with the innovative tech we’ve seen showcased at the likes of the Consumer Electronics Show.

However, for many, the issue of broadband speeds pales in comparison to the far larger barrier of getting a foot on the ladder in the first place, so we felt it was important to incorporate property price affordability into this research.

When these things are considered together, the results are perhaps surprising, but showcase the diversity of the UK market and the areas that could best accommodate the smart home revolution right here and now.”