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

The latest anecdotal September 2013 study of big fixed line broadband ISP performance in the United Kingdom from Broadband.co.uk has reported that the average download speed is now 16.907Mbps (down from 17.512Mbps in August), which falls to 2.804Mbps for the average upload speed (down from 2.894Mbps).

Nothing special to report this week except for a few general fluctuations in performance between the ISPs, otherwise Virgin Media remains top for download performance and BT are still king of the uploads. Sky Broadband does however appear to be showing persistent speed improvements and as a result they’re already threatening PlusNet’s position on the download table.

Top 7 UK ISPs – Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 35.205Mbps
2. BT – 17.630Mbps
3. PlusNet – 12.601Mbps
4. Sky Broadband – 10.810Mbps
5. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 7.399Mbps
6. EE (Orange) – 7.317Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 6.310Mbps

Top 7 UK ISPs – Upload Speed
1. BT – 4.531Mbps
2. Virgin Media – 3.601Mbps
3. PlusNet – 3.212Mbps
4. Sky Broadband – 1.753Mbps
5. EE (Orange) – 1.345Mbps
6. TalkTalk (Tiscali) – 0.815Mbps
7. O2 (BE Broadband) – 0.776Mbps

Disclaimer: Please 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 help to highlight other changes in the market.

In addition, the faster speeds from the latest “super-fast” connections (FTTC, FTTP etc.) can have a very disproportionate impact compared with the older and often significantly slower copper-based ADSL2+ services that dominate most homes. Sadly the source data doesn’t separate the results out by technology or include smaller ISPs (not enough data).