The 2015 vs 2014 Top UK Fastest Home Broadband and Mobile ISPs

We take a quick look back over the past year to see how much the national UK fixed line Home Broadband and Mobile providers have improved in terms of Internet connection speed. Unsurprisingly Virgin Media and EE Mobile remain top of their respective categories, but that’s only part of the picture.

It’s important to start by noting that the industry has seen a number of changes this year and some of these have had more of an impact than others upon service speed. For example, Virgin began extending the reach of their cable network to another 4 million premises by 2020 (here) and they’ve also just started boosting their top broadband speeds to 200Mbps (here).

Meanwhile BTOpenreach launched large-scale customer trials of their new 300-500Mbps G.fast broadband technology (here and here), although they won’t begin the commercial roll-out until 2016/17. At the same time Openreach has scaled-back their roll-out of Vectoring technology on FTTC “fibre broadband” lines (here), so we’re not expecting that to have a noticeable impact.

Otherwise we’ve seen plenty of general network expansions from other operators, such as the on-going work being done by smaller fibre optic (FTTP/H) broadband ISPs like Gigaclear and Hyperoptic. The reach of 4G (LTE) based Mobile Broadband networks has also improved significantly during 2015.

The UK Fastest Broadband Providers

As usual our report, which uses data from Thinkbroadband’s database, only includes providers with a wide national availability. This is primarily because smaller altnet ISPs aren’t available to the vast majority of people and others didn’t produce enough sample test data last year to be included, but we do mention some of them separately below the tables (those that we have data for at least).

It’s also crucial to note that ISPs which have a greater proportion of “superfast” (24Mbps+) connections than others, such as Virgin, will usually score higher because such performance can easily outweigh the results from customers on slower connectivity methods.

On the flip-side ISPs that still have a vast majority of customers on slower lines will weight against the impact from those with superfast connections and this is another reason why we recommend taking such results with a pinch of salt. In other words, just because an ISP returns a slower average (mean) speed doesn’t mean to say that this is the fault of the provider itself.

NOTE: The top 10% result represents the speeds experienced by the fastest 10% of customers on each ISP. In addition, the 2014 results are actually based off data published in Jan 2015, while the 2015 result uses the Dec 2015 published scores.

Top 10 Fastest UK National Home Broadband ISPs – Average Speeds

Average Upload Speed

Overall it’s interesting to note that there has been a gradual decrease in performance over the past year, except at a couple of providers, which may reflect the rising maturity of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) adoption that could be creating capacity strain at some Openreach based ISPs. Equally the lack of vectoring to tackle VDSL crosstalk at most FTTC cabinets may be playing a part, but it’s difficult to say for sure.

As usual it’s important to state that the above ISPs aren’t the fastest overall home broadband providers and if we were to expand our list in order to include niche ISPs, which often only focus upon smaller areas, then we’d need to include true fibre optic (FTTH/P) operators like the excellent Hyperoptic, B4RN and Gigaclear etc.

For example, Gigaclear’s rural FTTP project scored an average download speed of 72Mbps and 78.6Mbps for uploads, with the top 10% seeing average speeds of 154Mbps. Meanwhile Hyperoptic, which focuses more on delivering FTTP to big buildings in urban areas, topped the table by delivering 88.2Mbps for download and 77.1Mbps for uploads, with the top 10% on 252Mbps.

Both of the above ISPs offer 1000Mbps packages, but as usual those on slower tiers (e.g. 50Mbps and 20Mbps) will be dragging the results down. On top of that it’s difficult to reliably speed test the best connections (they push the limits of online testing, wifi, routers and even some wired computer links etc.).

Meanwhile, on the Mobile Broadband (3G and 4G) front, performance among the four primary operators has continued to improve at a sharper pace and that’s largely thanks to the impact of faster 4G, which is being rapidly deployed across the UK.

In this field EE benefits from having had a long head-start and so it’s no surprise to find that their superior 4G coverage is giving them a strong lead, but the others are clearly catching (see Ofcom’s infrastructure recent report).

The Fastest Mobile Operators – Download Speed

The Fastest Mobile Operators – Upload Speed

Separately it’s worth noting that the Tooway Direct ISP, which uses Satellite broadband technology from Eutelsat (KA-SAT), also managed to score a respectable mean download speed of 12.5Mbps. However their upload rate was a very poor 0.2Mbps and latency times for the connection were reported to be in the honorific slow 1000ms to 1500ms (milliseconds) territory, which is way above the 20-60ms range that you might expect on many fixed lines (i.e. fast paced multiplayer gaming is impossible on Satellite).

Disclaimer: It’s important to take average (mean) 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 provider’s ability to control (e.g. tests conducted via slower smartphone vs faster desktop computers, slow wifi, poor home wiring etc.), thus we do not consider the above data to be a reliable barometer for individual user connectivity, but it can help to highlight general changes in the market.