The Top 8 UK Fastest Fixed Line Home Broadband ISPs for April 2013

The latest monthly Broadband.co.uk survey of anecdotal consumer broadband ISP speed testing data for April 2013 has reported that the average download speed in the United Kingdom increased slightly from 18.831Mbps in March to 19.014Mbps now. The average upload speed also hit 3.068Mbps (up from 2.945Mbps).

As usual Virgin Media retain their position as the fastest ISP for internet downloads, although they fell slightly to 36.474Mbps from 38.400Mbps in March 2013. Virgin’s speed has been fuelled by their £110m double speed upgrade, which is due to complete in the summer and after that their performance should stabilise.

Elsewhere it remains a much tighter race for upload performance. BT tops the pack with an impressive score of 4.746Mbps and Virgin Media re-gained second place only to be trailed close behind by PlusNet. Sadly Eclipse Internet has seen both its download and upload rates continue to collapse, while EE has increased its performance to shoot up the table.

Top 8 UK ISPs – Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 36.474Mbps
2. BT – 19.208Mbps
3. PlusNet – 13.171Mbps
4. EE (Orange UK) – 10.293Mbps
5. Sky Broadband – 7.942Mbps
6. O2 (BE Broadband) – 7.655Mbps
7. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 7.178Mbps
8. Eclipse Internet – 6.130Mbps

Top 8 UK ISPs – Upload Speed
1. BT – 4.746Mbps
2. Virgin Media – 4.036Mbps
3. PlusNet – 3.567Mbps
4. EE (Orange) – 1.775Mbps
5. Sky Broadband – 1.482Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 0.904Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 0.800Mbps
8. Eclipse Internet – 0.492Mbps

As usual you should always take anecdotal data like this with a huge pinch of salt. Every home or business is different and performance can be affected by all sorts of issues, many of which are beyond the ISPs ability to control.

On top of that the faster speeds from the latest “superfast” technologies (FTTC etc.) can also have a disproportionate impact compared with the older and significantly slower copper-based ADSL2+ services.

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 tend to produce enough data for a useful comparison.