UPDATE Top 30 Slowest and Fastest UK Streets for Broadband Speed

A new study from uSwitch.com, which is based on data gathered via 1,030,865 consumer Internet speedtests conducted between August 2014 to February 2015, claims to have revealed that the slowest street in the United Kingdom for average broadband download speed is Williamson Road (Kent) at 0.53Mbps, while the fastest was Sandy Lane in Staffordshire on 72.86Mbps.

Overall the study claims that a third (34%) of the UK still struggles with sub 5Mbps (Megabits per second) speeds, while 23% make do with even slower speeds of less than 3Mbps. But on the flip side the number of people able to enjoy “superfast” speeds of 30Mbps+ (EU and Ofcom definition) has increased to 22% (up from 15% last year).

But it should be noted that the UK Government prefers to define superfast at the slightly lower level of “greater than 24Mbps“. A separate consumer study by uSwitch also noted how only 31% of respondents believed they could access related “fibre broadband” connectivity in their area, which is despite such services being available to around 80% of the UK.

Meanwhile those who get angry over the perceived north / south divide might like to know that the North of England delivered twice as many speedy streets as the South. But take all of this data with a huge pinch of salt, as we’ll shortly explain.

The Top 30 Fastest UK Streets

The Top 30 Slowest UK Streets

As usual this sort of report won’t reflect all of the caveats with such testing, although on this occasion uSwitch did at least look at the 30 slowest streets and found that 37% of them had access to “superfast” services, but residents have obviously chosen not to take it. This could be due to all sorts of reasons from higher prices, to a lack of awareness, being locked into a long contract or simply not seeing a need to upgrade. In the case of the slowest street, VFast already covers that area of Kent with superfast wireless.

It can also be the case that some of those marked as having “fibre broadband” connectivity available to them may simply not be able to receive a good enough speed boost from it to warrant paying extra for the upgrade (e.g. FTTC performance on Openreach’s national network can go as low as 2Mbps).

Another problem is that the slowest streets are actually the tiny proportion with no broadband access whatsoever, which wouldn’t show up here. On top of all that there are the usual caveats to remote speedtests, which will always struggle to reflect the impact of Traffic Management measures, poor home wiring, slow wifi and natural fluctuations in performance between congested peak and uncongested off-peak periods. Also we doubt that 100% of people in each area would have all used the uSwitch tester.

Some newspapers will no doubt use this report as an excuse to attack the government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, although those projects are still in the deployment stage and will remain there until at least 2017/18 when “superfast broadband” should become available to 95%. But even then you’ll still have 5% left to fix and some people will still choose to stick with their older, slower and cheaper connections. At the end of the day uSwitch’s report is not about availability.

UPDATE 10:51am

As usual Hyperoptic have been quick to comment.

Steve Holford, VP of Revenue at Hyperoptic, said:

“Today’s report from uSwitch on broadband speeds by streets certainly outlines the broadband postcode lottery faced by UK residents today. Consumers need, and deserve, better broadband connectivity, both in terms of speeds and consistency, in order to live their lives without compromise.

This report helps raise awareness that high-speed broadband isn’t a given, and to help mitigate against becoming a broadband have-not, consumers need to check the speeds available before moving and understand the differences between the services on offer. We are proud to be bringing the fastest broadband to consumers with our alternative full fibre approach that enables gigabit connectivity, plugging the urban not-spots that are plaguing the UK.”