How did you ISP perform in the national speed tests?

Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, has released a report detailing the real broadband connection speeds available in Britain.

As streaming video and music content becomes increasingly popular, consumers are increasingly feeling the ‘need for speed’. There have been several reports in recent months asking whether there is a disparity between the speed advertised by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) an that actually received by consumers. Now the new research from Ofcom has answered this question once and for all.

The research, carried out in conjunction with technical partner SamKnows and market research agency GfK, provides data on the actual speeds that UK consumers are getting from their broadband providers. Over 60 million separate service performance tests were carried out in over 1600 homes between November 2008 and April 2009. The research sample allowed Ofcom to compare the performance of the UK’s nine largest ISPs by market share over this period.

The research found that there were significant differences in the download speeds offered by providers, with speeds depending on the technology used to deliver broadband and the capacity of the provider’s network.

The average broadband speed in the UK in April 2009 was 4.1Mbit/s. This compares to an average ‘up to’ headline speed of 7.1 Mbit/s. Among those customers promised speeds of ‘up to 8Mbit/s’, fewer than one in ten (9%) received average speeds of over 6Mbit/s and around one in five (19%) received less than 2Mbit/s.

The report also found that living in an urban area gives consumers a speed advantage over their rural counterparts. The average speed delivered to urban consumers was found to be 4.6Mbit/s, compared to an average of 3.3Mbit/s delivered to rural consumers.

All ISPs were found to provide consumers with a slower service during peak evening hours (8-10pm), with an average reduction in speed during these hours of 20%.

Overall, Virgin Media was found to offer the fastest connection speed on average, allowing consumers to connect at an average connection speed of 8.1 to 8.7Mbit/s on its ‘up to 10Mbit/s’ package. Bottom of the table was AOL, offering average speeds of just 3.3 to 3.9Mbit/s on its ‘up to 8Mbit/s’ service.

Performance among other ISPs varied:

ISP and package Average speed
BT (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s) 3.8 to 4.2Mbit/s
O2 (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s)* 4.1 to 5.1Mbit/s
Orange (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s) 3.8 to 4.5Mbit/s
Plusnet (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s)* 3.8 to 4.9Mbit/s
Sky (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s) 4.0 to 4.7Mbit/s
Talk Talk (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s) 3.8 to 4.6Mbit/s
Tiscali (‘up to’ 8Mbit/s) 3.2 to 3.7Mbit/s

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