The Top 7 UK Fastest Fixed Line Home Broadband ISPs for June 2013

According to the latest anecdotal monthly survey of fixed line home broadband ISP speeds from Broadband.co.uk, the average internet download speed in the United Kingdom hasn’t budged much from 18.180Mbps in May 2013 to 18.365Mbps in June and average upload rates were static at 2.882Mbps.

It probably won’t surprise anybody to find that Virgin Media remains the king of the hill for download performance after it put in a score of 38.702Mbps, which is up from 36.385Mbps in May. Similarly BT remains top of the pack for upload rates with a score of 4.380Mbps (largely unchanged from May 2013), though Virgin are close to catching on 4.108Mbps.

Sadly O2 (BE Broadband) lines, which are now owned by Sky Broadband but won’t be fully migrated into their network until later next year, continues to languish at the bottom due in part to a lack of superfast broadband (FTTC) products. Interestingly most ISPs actually lost some speed but Virgin’s gain compensated to keep the averages level.

Top 7 UK ISPs – Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 38.702Mbps
2. BT – 16.920Mbps
3. Sky Broadband – 9.376Mbps
4. PlusNet – 9.175Mbps
5. EE (Orange UK) – 7.901Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 7.246Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 5.909Mbps

Top 7 UK ISPs – Upload Speed
1. BT – 4.380Mbps
2. Virgin Media – 4.108Mbps
3. PlusNet – 1.863Mbps
4. Sky Broadband – 1.365Mbps
5. EE (Orange) – 1.309Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 0.798Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 0.760Mbps

Please always 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. 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.

On top of that the faster speeds from the latest “superfast” technologies (FTTC) can also have a disproportionate impact compared with the older and often significantly slower copper-based ADSL / ADSL2+ services that are still used by the majority of homes. Sadly the table doesn’t include smaller ISPs because they simply don’t produce enough data.