The latest broadband speed stats are in and it appears that not all UK broadband firms are keeping pace. The team at Opensignal, which offers reports and insights into the world’s biggest communications networks, has just released its latest UK findings and there are some big winners and losers.
Coming out on top for overall download speeds is London-based Community Fibre with this Internet Service Provider (ISP) offering average speeds of 159.6Mbps – that’s over double the UK average. Coming in second place was Virgin Media (129.5Mbps) followed by Hyperoctic (119.2Mbps) and Gigaclear (109Mbps).
At the other end of the scale was BT-owned Plusnet who managed an average of just 35.4Mbps. EE, TalkTalk and Sky didn’t perform much better with all of these hugely popular ISPs scoring below 42Mbps. Of course, one of the reasons those firms have lower speeds is that they rely on a nationwide network which isn’t fully connected to fibre cables just yet.
That means many homes that use the likes of Sky, EE and Plusnet are still linked up to the web via ageing copper cables which simply can match newer technology.
If you want the fastest peak download speeds in the UK then Community Fibre gets the top spot again with an average of 591Mbps. The local supplier, which connects around one million homes, also has the best upload speeds as well.
So that’s the stats for speed but what about the quality of the network? Once again Community Fibre is in joint first place alongside Gigaclear with a score of over 90. In second is Virgin Media (score 89), followed by Vodafone (score 87.5), Hyperoptic (score 86.1) and BT (score 84.8).
Coming last was Three Mobile with this firm getting the lowest score of 69.7. Opensignal says that it defines Broadband Quality using six performance indicators. These include download and upload speed, latency, packet loss, jitter and time to first byte.
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“As might be expected, fibre-only players perform strongly when analysing our users’ experience nationally,” Opensignal said in a post on its website.
“London-based Community Fibre has the outright highest score across all three of Opensignal’s speed metrics (Broadband Download Speed, Broadband Peak Download Speed and Broadband Upload Speed), while also statistically tying for first place with rural-focused Gigaclear for Broadband Consistent Quality. In addition, Community Fibre, Hyperoptic and Gigaclear are far ahead of the other analysed ISPs in terms of the average upload speeds observed by our users.
“However, cable/FTTP provider Virgin Media also performs strongly nationally, being the runner-up for Broadband Download Speed, Broadband Consistent Quality, Broadband Video Experience and sharing that distinction with Hyperoptic for Broadband Peak Download Speed.”
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