Top 10 UK Fastest and Slowest Streets for Broadband in 2021

A new report has used data from 276,083 consumer speedtests to reveal the top 10 fastest and slowest streets for broadband ISP download speed in the UK. The slowest street was found to be Wistaston Road (Crewe) in Cheshire on just 0.24Mbps, while the fastest was Haul Fryn (Birchgrove) in Swansea on 882Mbps.

The Uswitch.com research is based on speed tests conducted over a 12-month period from 1st October 2020 to 30th September 2021. In order for a street to qualify for inclusion, tests from at least 3 unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and at least 10 residential properties were required at a postcode. But as usual with this sort of study, there are some big caveats.

The “good news“, claims the study, is that the number of broadband users enjoying faster speeds is growing, and it highlights how 43% now get speeds of more than 30Mbps – this is said to be “almost double” what it was six years ago (22%). But curiously they seem to forget that last year’s survey actually put this figure at 54% (here), thus 43% is actually a decline. Every other survey we’ve seen shows a clear increase, so this is a bit bizarre.

The research also notes that the number of speed tests conducted for the 2021 report is up 124% on 2019’s tally of 122,845, with the “dramatic rise suggesting that consumers have been paying closer attention to the performance of their home broadband since the start of the pandemic.” But this overlooks that last year’s (2020) report used data from 398,973 consumer speedtests, thus the figure appears to have significantly declined.

More Caveats and Context

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 (i.e. superfast networks currently cover 96% of premises and ultrafast is nearly 70%, but many homes have yet to upgrade). However, uSwitch does point out that, of the ten slowest streets, nine actually have access to a quicker service.

Clearly, consumer awareness and adoption of faster packages remains a key issue. 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 like this can of course also be influenced by other factors too, such as poor home wiring, the user’s choice of package (e.g. 1Gbps could be available, but people may pick a slower tier to save money), local (home) network congestion and slow WiFi performance etc. In short, take these results with a big pinch of salt.

The Top 10 Slowest UK Streets for Broadband

One oddity in the way Uswitch has done this is that they’ve put ‘Yes’ under “ultrafast broadband” availability for several streets, but at the same time they’ve left “superfast broadband” as ‘No’ on a few of those same streets, which doesn’t make much sense to us (ultrafast connections are faster than superfast, thus if ultrafast is a ‘Yes’ then it follows that superfast should also be ‘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 4G or 5G mobile connections were included or not. Lest we forget that the slowest streets will actually be those precious few locations that still struggle to get a working internet connection at all or have too few results, which won’t show up above.

In the near future, this picture may also become further complicated once the new generation of LEO based satellite broadband services become more widely available or affordable. At present, Starlink’s (SpaceX) service is a bit too expensive to be considered a mass market solution, and we don’t yet know what kind of products BT or Eutelsat will launch for consumers via OneWeb’s platform.