The Fastest Big UK ISPs According to SamKnows New Broadband Test

Internet speed analyst firm SamKnows has this week posted the results from a limited run of their new “sensationally accurate” broadband ISP speedtest tool, which was tested last month as part of support for some research that the BBC’s Watchdog TV show was doing. Unsurprisingly Virgin Media came top, with TalkTalk bottom.

Arguably SamKnows is better known for its direct method of testing, which delivers very accurate results by installing specially modified routers in homes to test the connection performance (Ofcom’s uses this for their study of broadband speeds). The biggest drawback to this approach is cost and as a result the end-user sample size tends to be quite small (no more than a few thousand premises).

Meanwhile the rest of us tend to conduct a Broadband Speedtest by using one of the many web-based solutions, although SamKnows has claimed that the accuracy of those can sometimes struggle to produce reliable results for the new generation of Gigabit (1Gbps) or even multi-Gigabit “full fibre” (FTTP) ISPs.

“Excitingly, we’re testing faster and faster connections. But importantly, we’re finding that traditional web tests struggle to handle such speeds, and their performance can vary depending on the browser or computer its running on. So, six months ago, we decided to create a SamKnows Web Test, making it sensationally accurate,” said the organisation.

The first challenge came on 9th November 2018, when the BBC raised some concerns about the accuracy of such tests at “high speeds” and SamKnows agreed to let them use their new cloud-based test for the programme. Starting at 8pm on 9th November, the tester received data from over 15,000 speed tests by the following day.

The sample size from such a limited run is too small to offer a wide overview of the market but it did revealed how the biggest five broadband ISPs faired (i.e. BT, Plusnet, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media). As you’d expect Virgin Media came top for download speed (superior cable network), with TalkTalk marked as the slowest (including for latency, although they did well for upload speeds).

In Figure 3 we can see a table summarising the results of some of the largest ISPs in the UK. The mean is a simple average over the entire dataset, while the median and the 80th percentile shows the speed that 50% and 80% of the tests achieved respectively.

At this point we have to step in with a little reality check. Nothing that SamKnows does will ever be able to overcome all of the inherent problems with web based speedtests, which can be affected by all sorts of issues, such as slow WiFi, limitations of the testing / server itself, package choice, home network congestion at the time of testing, remote network / ISP peering problems and hardware limits etc.

Meanwhile anybody who wants to give the new test a try can do so over here, although it’s really more intended for testing Gigabit or faster connections and probably won’t tell you anything new on slower lines. Our own results suggested that it was no less or more accurate than any of the other tests, but alas we don’t have a 1Gbps line to play with 🙁 .