Top 10 UK Fastest and Slowest Streets for Broadband Speed 2020

A new report has used data from 398,973 consumer speedtests to identify the top 10 fastest and slowest UK streets for broadband ISP download speed, which finds that Queens Road in Weybridge (Surrey) was the “slowest” on 0.12Mbps and Dale Lane in Appleton (Cheshire) is the fastest at 639.67Mbps. But there are caveats.

The uSwitch.com research is based on speed tests conducted over a 12-month period from 1st October 2019 to 30th September 2020. In order for a street to qualify for inclusion, tests from at least 3 unique IP addresses and at least 10 residential properties were required at a postcode.

The good news is that the number of broadband users enjoying faster speeds is growing. Some 54% now get “superfast” speeds of more than 30Mbps (up from 22% five years ago). But at the same time it’s worth remembering that superfast networks currently cover around 96% of UK premises, which means that a lot of people have yet to upgrade.

Caveats and Context

As usual one of the biggest problems with studies like this is that they can easily be taken at face value, which is a problem because consumer speedtests don’t correctly reflect the actual underlying availability of faster networks. However, uSwitch does point out that, of the ten slowest streets, seven (70%) have access to a quicker service.

Clearly awareness of faster packages is still a key problem for some people. In other cases, consumers may be aware that a faster service exists, but they have simply chosen not to upgrade due to various issues, such as the potentially higher price, being stuck in a long 18-24 month contract term or a simple lack of need / desire for anything faster.

Speedtests can of course also be influenced by other factors too, such as poor home wiring, user choice of package (e.g. 1Gbps could be available but most people may still pick a slower and cheaper tier on the same fibre), local (home) network congestion and slow WiFi performance etc. In short, take these results with a good pinch of salt.

The Top 10 Slowest UK Streets for Broadband

One curious oddity in the way uSwitch has done this is that they’ve put ‘Yes’ or ‘Some’ under “ultrafast broadband” availability for several streets, yet at the same time left “superfast broadband” as ‘No’ on those same streets, which doesn’t make much sense to us (ultrafast connections are faster than superfast and thus if ultrafast is a ‘Yes’ then it follows that superfast is also ‘Yes’).

The Top 10 Fastest UK Streets for Broadband

We should add that business class high-capacity leased lines might be impacting some of the above the results and it’s similarly unclear whether mobile connections were included or not. Lest we forget that the slowest streets will be those precious few isolated locations that still struggle to get a working internet connection at all or have too few results, which won’t show up above.