H1-2017 – The Top 10 Fastest National UK Home Broadband and Mobile ISPs

The first half of 2017 has seen another rise in average fixed line broadband download speeds to 28.21Mbps, albeit mostly fuelled by the on-going migration of consumers from older ADSL lines and on to newer “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) services. Meanwhile EE is still king for Mobile Broadband.

Since the end of last year there have been a number of key developments in the industry and some of these will impact the latest results. Firstly, faster cable (DOCSIS) and “fibre” based (FTTC/H/P) broadband lines have expanded to cover an estimated 93% of UK premises and more than half of all subscribers now take such a service (i.e. older / slower ADSL lines are in decline).

On top of that Virgin has once again boosted their top consumer broadband speeds to 300Mbps and the operator’s entry-level package has also been lifted to 100Mbps (this change is very recent and so won’t have much of an impact upon today’s results), which is the point that many people consider to be the start of the “ultrafast” generation of Internet access technologies.

Elsewhere Openreach has begun to ramp up their roll-out of ultrafast FTTP broadband to 2 million premises by 2020 (there’s also talk of them possibly doing 10 million by around 2025) and they’ve largely completed the deployment of their G.fast pilot to over 100,000 premises (speeds of up to 330Mbps). Neither of these have reached mass market coverage and so won’t be having a big impact on the results below.

Finally, 4G (Mobile Broadband) network coverage has continued to increase, albeit not quite as rapidly as in previous years because the population coverage is finally reaching maturity (98%). Mobile operators have also continued to upgrade their 4G+ performance, which in several UK cities can now deliver speeds of 400Mbps+ (here); albeit only under good conditions.

The Fastest UK Broadband Providers (H1 2017)

As usual our scores are based on data extracted from Thinkbroadband‘s database and only include independent providers with strong national availability. Sadly smaller alternative network (altnet) ISPs tend not to produce much data and aren’t available to the vast majority of premises, although we do highlight some of them later on.

On top of that it’s vital to note that ISPs which have a greater proportion of “superfast” (24Mbps+) or “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) connections, such as Virgin, will usually score higher because their performance will outweigh the results from customers on slower connectivity methods or packages (e.g. Virgin’s entry-level tier is now 100Mbps and thus they tend to pull ahead of others).

By comparison the slowest 4-5 ISPs usually have a higher proportion of subscribers on older and slower copper ADSL lines, which suppresses their standing and this is partly 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.

Lest we forget that slow WiFi and local network congestion (e.g. running a speedtest at the same time as somebody else is downloading a big file / patch), among other things, can also impact the results.

NOTE: The top 10% result below represents the speeds experienced by the fastest 10% of customers on each ISP.

Average Download Speeds (Top 10)

Average Upload Speeds (Top 10)

Overall the average download speed of the top ten national providers was 28.21Mbps (up from 24.63Mbps at the end of 2016) and the average upload speed also hit 6.21Mbps (up from 5.3Mbps). Some will immediately note that the only ISP to record a decrease in performance was Vodafone, although we’re not reading too much into that because they’ve only recently entered the market and unusual fluctuations are to be expected.

At this point it’s worth taking a look at how smaller alternative network (altnet) providers compare with the mainstream national ISPs. Sadly most altnets only have a comparatively niche level of network coverage and sample speedtest data, which means that we can’t offer a very comprehensive list.

Altnets by Average Speed H1 2017 vs H2 2016

All of the above providers use ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP/H) technology, which can deliver Gigabit speeds. However not everybody chooses the fastest package offered by each ISP (e.g. Hyperoptic offers packages from 20Mbps upwards) and ultrafast connections are also much more likely to be impacted by the limitations of other technologies (e.g. WiFi or older Ethernet standards).

Likewise KCOM may have a large FTTP network, although many of their customers are still using much slower ADSL2+ services and a little FTTC. Once again all of these factors combine to drag down the performance. Never the less it’s clear to see that there’s a huge difference in speed between the largely hybrid-fibre dominated national networks and these pure fibre optic altnets.

The Top Fastest Mobile Network Operators

Generally speaking the fastest Mobile Network Operator (MNO) is usually the one with the best 4G coverage and unsurprisingly that puts EE ahead of the pack, although this may change as the others catch-up and upgrade their networks accordingly. Interestingly not a lot has changed over the past six months and only Vodafone registered a strong improvement in download speed.

The story for upload performance is more positive, albeit only when looking at the percentages (i.e. going from 3.1Mbps to 3.5Mbps on O2 won’t make a huge difference to how your actually connection feels).

Average Download Speeds

Average Upload Speeds

Overall the average download speed of the top mobile providers is 18.6Mbps (up from 18.12Mbps at the end of 2016) and the average upload speed also hit 4.4Mbps (up from 3.9Mbps).

Disclaimer: It’s important to take average speeds, like those reported 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. slow wi-fi 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.

Mobile connections are also particularly subject to the daily movements and radically differing hardware choices (Smartphones etc.) of their end-users, which makes it especially difficult to establish a reliable picture of performance across each network.

Finally, readers can conduct a test of their Internet connection performance via our Speedtest Page, which also contains a simplified summary of the above data including a longer historic comparison; this reflects the fact that we tend to update our service speed data every 6 months.