The Top 6 UK Fastest Big Home Broadband ISPs – February 2014

The latest Internet speed testing data for February 2014 has found that the average home broadband download speed for the largest six ISPs in the United Kingdom has stayed almost static at 17.097Mbps over the past month, while the average upload rate was similarly stable at 3.055Mbps.

Overall not a lot has changed with Broadband.co.uk’s data since January’s update (here) and we don’t expect Virgin Media’s latest round of speed boosting (here) to have much of an impact until Spring 2014. Otherwise BT’s average download performance climbed a little to pass the 20Mbps milestone, while EE, TalkTalk and PlusNet all lost a Megabit or so.

Top 6 Big UK ISPs – Average Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 33.256Mbps
2. BT – 20.197Mbps
3. PlusNet – 12.660Mbps
4. Sky Broadband – 10.343Mbps
5. EE (Orange) – 9.661Mbps
6. TalkTalk – 8.748Mbps

Top 6 Big UK ISPs – Average Upload Speed
1. BT – 4.933Mbps
2. Virgin Media – 3.697Mbps
3. PlusNet – 3.411Mbps
4. EE (Orange) – 2.200Mbps
5. Sky Broadband – 2.148Mbps
6. TalkTalk – 1.212Mbps

Disclaimer: Please take anecdotal data like this with a big 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 general changes in the market.

In addition, faster speeds from the latest “super-fast” connections (FTTC, FTTP etc.) can have a disproportionate impact compared with the older and slower copper-based ADSL2+ (up to 20-24Mbps) services that still dominate most homes. Sadly the source data doesn’t separate the results out by technology or include smaller ISPs (not enough data).