Top 9 UK Fastest Broadband ISPs by Speed for March 2012

The latest anecdotal monthly consumer broadband ISP speed testing results from Broadband.co.uk, which covers the month of March 2012, reveals that the average UK internet download speed has shot up from 8.210Mbps (Megabits per second) during January 2012 to 10.731Mbps now.

The average broadband upload speed has also increased from 1.313Mbps in January 2012 to 1.482Mbps now. Meanwhile it will come as little surprise that Virgin Media is still the fastest overall broadband ISP in the UK, achieving impressive download speeds of 19.633Mbps (up from 15.331Mbps in Jan 2012) and uploads of 2.476Mbps (virtually unchanged from 2.463Mbps in Jan 2012).

As usual only BT and Eclipse Internet, which remain dominated by their slower ADSL2+ services, can even get close and that’s largely thanks to the growing adoption of their superfast broadband (FTTC etc.) packages (many of the other ISPs still lack superfast options).

Top 9 UK ISPs – Download Speed (Megabits/sec)
1. Virgin Media – 19.633Mbps
2. Eclipse Internet – 11.512Mbps
3. BT – 9.466Mbps
4. PlusNet – 7.269Mbps
5. O2 ( Be Broadband ) – 6.075Mbps
6. Sky Broadband – 5.766Mbps
7. AOL – 5.733Mbps
8. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 5.282Mbps
9. Orange UK – 4.101Mbps

Top 9 UK ISPs – Upload Speed (Megabits/sec)
1. Virgin Media – 2.476Mbps
2. Eclipse Internet – 1.774Mbps
3. BT – 1.753Mbps
4. PlusNet – 0.897Mbps
5. O2 ( Be Broadband ) – 0.875Mbps
6. AOL – 0.770Mbps
7. Sky Broadband – 0.650Mbps
8. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 0.594Mbps
9. Orange UK – 0.566Mbps

Typically 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 things, most of which are beyond an ISPs control. We do not consider the above to be a reliable barometer for individual users but it can help to reflect overall market changes.