UK Top 7 Fastest Fixed Line Home Broadband ISPs for May 2013

The latest anecdotal monthly study of consumer broadband ISP speed testing data from Broadband.co.uk has found that the average download speed in the United Kingdom has fallen from 19.014Mbps in April to 18.180Mbps in May 2013. Average upload speeds also hit 2.881Mbps (down from 3.068Mbps).

As usual Virgin Media tops the pack as the fastest ISP for internet download speeds with a broadly unchanged score of 36.385Mbps (Megabits per second), while BT continues to come top for upload performance on 4.384Mbps (down a little from 4.746Mbps last month).

Sadly Eclipse Internet has dropped out of this month’s list due to a lack of sufficient speed tests for the data to be considered “statistically significant” (i.e. too few tests). As a result O2’s (BE Broadband) former home broadband customers are now bottom of both tables due to a lack of superfast broadband and other problems (in the future their results may be merged with Sky’s).

Top 7 UK ISPs – Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 36.385Mbps
2. BT – 17.922Mbps
3. PlusNet – 11.057Mbps
4. EE (Orange UK) – 9.765Mbps
5. Sky Broadband – 8.043Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 7.695Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 6.566Mbps

Top 7 UK ISPs – Upload Speed
1. BT – 4.384Mbps
2. Virgin Media – 3.739Mbps
3. PlusNet – 2.845Mbps
4. EE (Orange) – 1.930Mbps
5. Sky Broadband – 1.340Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 0.934Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 0.819Mbps

Readers should take anecdotal data like this with a huge 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. Faster speeds from the latest “superfast” technologies (FTTC) can also have a disproportionate impact compared with the older and significantly slower copper-based ADSL services that are still used by the majority of homes.

We do not consider the above data to be a reliable barometer for individual users but it can be used to highlight other changes in the market. Sadly the table doesn’t include smaller ISPs because they don’t produce enough data for a useful comparison.