The Top 8 UK Fastest Big Home Fixed Line Broadband ISPs – April 2014

The average fixed line consumer broadband ISP Internet download speed for the largest eight national Internet access providers in the United Kingdom held fairly steady at 21.32Mbps in April 2014, while uploads touched the 5Mbps mark.

As with the previous month we’ve continued our experiment by using Ookla’s data from Speedtest.net, albeit with the addition of Eclipse to this month’s list. We initially attempted to add some other ISPs but they were either too small (not enough tests), couldn’t provide a service to most of the UK, didn’t run their own networks or were mostly business orientated.

On top of that we now take the overall average speeds from only the ISPs listed below rather than Ookla’s overall total (their overall figures are skewed by business ISPs and mobile), which is why we’ve not included a comparison with last month. Also from this month on we’ll be tracking monthly changes at each provider and intend to report on that in future updates.

Otherwise it will come as little surprise to find BT and Virgin Media at the top since they include a strong proportion of superfast broadband connections, which can often have a disproportionate impact compared with the older and slower ADSL2+ services that seem to dominate many other ISPs.

Top 8 Big UK ISPs – Average Download Speed (Megabits per second)
1. Virgin Media – 48.94Mbps
2. BT – 24.91Mbps
3. PlusNet – 21.69Mbps
4. Zen Internet – 21.26Mbps
5. Eclipse Internet – 15.39Mbps
6. Sky Broadband – 12.89Mbps
7. EE – 12.77Mbps
8. TalkTalk – 12.71Mbps

Top 8 Big UK ISPs – Average Upload Speed
1. BT – 7.47Mbps
2. PlusNet – 6.71Mbps
3. Zen Internet – 6.46Mbps
4. Virgin Media – 5.32Mbps
5. Eclipse Internet – 4.91Mbps
6. Sky Broadband – 3.86Mbps
7. EE (Orange) – 3.09Mbps
8. TalkTalk – 2.33Mbps

Putting these results into a wider perspective, we’ve also made a note of how some of the smaller and often faster ISPs perform. In no particular order: Gigaclear (107.99Mbps Down / 138.73Mbps Up), Ask4 (24.52Mbps Down / 7.93Mbps Up), KC (18.82Mbps Down / 4.61Mbps Up), B4RN (282.73Mbps Down / 222.71Mbps Up), Hyperoptic (113.10Mbps Down / 119.55Mbps Up) and AAISP (20.19Mbps Down / 5.08Mbps Up). Unsurprisingly the three dedicated fibre optic (FTTH/P) providers, most of which offer symmetric speeds, stand out from the pack.

As usual it’s important to take average speeds like those above 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 (e.g. slow wifi or poor home wiring), thus 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.

On top of that it’s known that Ookla’s data attempts to reflect the fastest sustainable throughput performance by dropping a sizeable chunk of the slowest tests and a smaller slice of the fastest results for each ISP, which has its merits but also skews the results a bit.