The 10 Best and Worst Connected UK Cities for Broadband and Mobile

A new study from comparison site GoCompare has combined data on broadband ISP speeds with public WiFi and 4G Mobile availability in order to produce a new ranking of 57 cities, which claims to identify both the best and worst connected. London comes top of the table, while Exeter sits right at the bottom.

Apparently London is deemed to be the best connected UK city because it has 4G coverage of 60.92%, average fixed line broadband download speeds of 31.70Mbps and the number of people per WiFi hotspot is measured as 698. By comparison the worst city, Exeter, scored just 6.31% for 4G coverage, while also delivering average fixed line speeds of 26.84Mbps and the number of people per WiFi hotspot is 1166.

GoCompare does not clarify how this data was collected and filtered, although we can already spot a few obvious flaws. The biggest one stems from the classic mistake of gauging the strength of fixed line broadband connectivity by looking purely at speedtest based data, which is more a reflection of historic local take-up than the availability of faster networks.

For example, bottom dwelling Exeter sounds terrible in this study but they’ve overlooked the fact that Virgin Media’s ultrafast broadband cable network is available across the vast majority of the city and Openreach’s FTTC and FTTP fibre networks also have coverage that’s nearly as strong. As such we consider that local network competition and availability may be a better gauge.

Top 10 Best Connected UK Cities

Top 10 Worst Connected UK Cities

You can check out the full results here but remember to take them with a pinch of salt.