Detailed Broadband Download Speeds for the Top 20 Fastest UK ISPs

A new report has produced a detailed breakdown of the top 20 fastest broadband providers in the United Kingdom by Internet download speed, which goes into significantly more depth than most of the other studies we’ve seen. Overall Hyperoptic’s FTTH network in London tops the table, while TalkTalk’s low cost and ADSL dominated solution gets pushed to the bottom.

The data from Thinkbroadband has been split into several different tables, which allows us to see various different aspects of the raw information. For example, it usefully depicts what the fastest 10% of an ISPs customer base receive (e.g. 50.5Mbps on BT) and what the slowest 10% get (e.g. 1.8Mbps on BT).

As usual it’s important to remember that some ISPs offer more than one method of connection technology (e.g. ADSL and FTTC), while others that claim to deliver Gigabit speeds will also sell slower speed packages at a lower cost. Business connections are also more prevalent than domestic ones on some ISPs and issues such as these will affect the results of any study. In addition, such data generally reflects what people actually use rather than the availability of the best connection method.

On top of that some of the fastest ISPs, such as Gigaclear, haven’t been included due to a lack of raw testing data (a common problem for smaller providers) and it’s also unclear how many samples were used to produce each providers result. Similarly there are some providers listed, such as ADSL24 (sold off to Coms), which no longer exist but may still show because their connections remain tagged to the old name. Likewise Murphx was a supplier, rather than an end-user ISP, that was gobbled by Daisy a few years ago.

Never the less the information presented is quite illuminating and gives a better overview than most other studies into broadband performance, provided you remember to consider all the usual caveats of such data (as above).