New Cisco sponsored research, which was conducted by the University of Oxford's Said Business School and University of Oviedo, has found that the UK placed a lowly 25th when ranked against 66 other countries in terms of broadband network quality. The global average download speed was also revealed to be 4.75Mbps, with uploads averaging 1.3Mbps.

This places the UK reasonably close to the global average, with Ofcom's April research revealing that our average broadband download speed stood at 4.1Mbps (here), which is up from the 3.6Mbps reported during January this year. Happily average UK speeds should continue to rise thanks to a growth spurt in 'up to' 24Mbps ADSL2+ services, Virgin Media's 50Mbps product and future fibre optic network developments from BT and others.


The study suggested that broadband networks would require a minimum download speed of 3.75Mbps, upload speed of 1Mbps and latency of 95ms to meet today’s Internet requirements. It's worth noting that, while we might have the download and latency performance covered, our average uploads tend to be around half what is needed.

As for the future; in 3 to 5 years Internet applications are forecast to place demand that will require download speeds of 11.25Mbps, uploads of 5Mbps and latency of 60ms. It's not entirely clear why we will suddenly "require" 5Mbps uploads, although we suppose it depends upon how important consumer interaction with new content becomes.

The study also included data on the quality of wireless broadband services for the first time. On average, mobile devices connecting to Wi-Fi services meet the broadband quality threshold required for today’s mobile Internet applications. However the average of 3G and 3G+ Mobile Broadband technologies do not currently meet the threshold due to low upload throughput.


We assume the above chart is measuring mobile speeds in Kbps (Kilobits per second), although this chart is not properly explained in the details.

UPDATE - 2nd October 2009:

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has disagreed with Cisco's broadband survey that states the UKs broadband is meeting today's needs.