ISPreview Site Status – Update to UK ISP Listings System

We’ve just completed one of our periodic updates to the UK ISP Listings database, which is done to ensure that all the packages and prices we list are up-to-date. As part of that we’ve also made a few small tweaks as a result of some reader feedback and general requirements.

Firstly, the main listings for superfast (24Mbps+) and ultrafast (100Mbps+) packages no longer show any “up to” speeds as we’ve switched to only displaying the “average speed” (measured at peak time). We’ll expand this to the other categories in the very near future (we’ve been showing averages for a long time, so this is just a cosmetic change and the original “up to” speeds still show on the detail page for each ISP; alongside the averages).

In doing this we’ve had to tackle the problem of smaller ISPs, many of which have chosen to continue displaying “up to” speeds (against the ASA’s wishes) or in a few cases they may not display any speed at all. In order to get around this we’ve looked at what other ISPs were advertising as “averages” on the same broadband network and adopted the following generalisations for all such ISPs (better than leaving the fields blank).

Openreach Type – Down/Up (Mbps)
ADSL 20/1 = 10/1
FTTC 40/10 = 36/9
FTTC 55/10 = 50/9
FTTC 80/20 = 66/18
FTTP/G.fast 160/30 = 145/29
FTTP/G.fast 330/50 = 300/49

NOTE: We do some slight variations for other networks / tiers and will revise these based on how ISPs change their advertised rates in the future (remember, this is based on what ISPs advertise and NOT what we think the averages actually are for each tier).

Some readers also asked if we could show which underlying network (Openreach, Cityfibre etc.) was being used by each ISP and in response we’ve put that on the main listings output. As a result it’s now much easier to see whether an ISP uses Openreach’s network or offers consumers services via an alternative platform.

We’ve also been asked to show which specific broadband technology each package is using, as opposed to just listing all of the technologies being used / offered by each ISP. This will now display on both the main listings summary pages and individual ISP detail pages, although we still have some work to do with regards to cleaning up the format / styling a bit.