The Top 8 Fastest National Home Broadband ISPs for June 2014

The average Internet download speed for the largest 8 fixed line home broadband ISPs in the United Kingdom has inched slightly upwards to 22.06Mbps during June 2014 (up from 21.7Mbps in May 2014), while uploads increased from an average of 5.04Mbps in May to 5.237Mbps now.

Broadly speaking June, despite being quite a sunny month, was somewhat dull in terms of changes in Internet access performance. Cable operator Virgin Media, which remains top of the download table, saw its average speeds rise over the month from 49.26Mbps to 52.98Mbps and Zen Internet lost around Megabit of speed to hit an average of 21.67Mbps, but otherwise the providers were all fairly stable.

Top 8 Big UK ISPs – Average Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 52.98Mbps
2. BT – 25.27Mbps
3. Zen Internet – 21.67Mbps
4. PlusNet – 20.83Mbps
5. Eclipse Internet – 15.77Mbps
6. TalkTalk – 13.40Mbps
7. EE – 13.32Mbps
8. Sky Broadband – 13.28Mbps

Top 8 Big UK ISPs – Average Upload Speed
1. BT – 7.51Mbps
2. Zen Internet – 6.80Mbps
3. PlusNet – 6.21Mbps
4. Virgin Media – 6.16Mbps
5. Eclipse Internet – 5.58Mbps
6. Sky Broadband – 4.06Mbps
7. EE (Orange) – 3.21Mbps
8. TalkTalk – 2.37Mbps

As usual our data, which represents the largest national providers (note: the fastest are often smaller ISPs that are capable of offering Gigabit speeds to specific areas), is gathered using Ookla’s universal Speedtest.net service and we then calculate the overall average speeds from only the ISPs listed above (Ookla’s overall figures are sadly too skewed by business ISPs, niche providers and mobile operators).

Similarly readers will notice a gap in performance between the top half of ISPs and the bottom half, which is largely because the last four tend to be dominated by slower ADSL2+ lines and the top providers benefit from having a greater proportion of “superfast broadband” (25Mbps+) capable connections. This is especially true of Virgin Media, which has already upgraded nearly everybody to a “superfast” service and is now boosting them even further.

It’s also important to take average speeds like these with a big pinch of salt. Every home is different and performance can be affected by all sorts of issues, many of which are beyond the ISPs ability to control (e.g. slow wifi or poor home wiring), thus we do not consider the above data to be a reliable barometer for individual users but it can help to highlight general changes in the market.

On top of that, Ookla’s data attempts to reflect the fastest sustainable throughput performance by dropping a chunk of the slowest tests and a smaller slice of the fastest results for each ISP, which has its merits but also skews the results a bit. Finally, speed testing services are rarely perfect, although this is usually more of an issue for ultrafast connections of 100Mbps+ (uncommon) than slower lines.