Broadband Speeds Help York Top List of Best UK Hybrid Working Places

Uswitch.com has attempted to identify the top 104 UK locations for hybrid workers, which sees the city of York come top thanks to its broadband speeds (159Mbps), good schools, low crime, and closeness to Leeds. By comparison, Hastings was the least desirable due to sluggish broadband, a lack of GPs and poor air quality.

The 2022 Hybrid Working Index ranks the biggest UK towns and cities for desirability to hybrid workers by examining eight metrics – average broadband speeds (download), quality of schools, house prices, green spaces, air quality, crime rates, distance to closest hub city and GPs per 1,000 people.

Each of its ranks in these categories is then weighted according to how survey respondents valued them (e.g. 45% said green spaces, 43% said crime rates, 34% said broadband speeds, 28% said air quality, 20% said ‘the amount of local doctors’, 16% ‘the quality of local schools’).

We’re surprised that broadband speed didn’t come first in the list and that they didn’t consider uploads (upstream is important for remote working). Plus there’s no mention of mobile coverage, which is relevant as a widely supported tool for remote working.

In addition, the broadband speeds data seems to have been extracted from Ofcom’s 2021 Connection Nations study, but we think a better measure would have been to look at the availability of faster networks. In any case, you can see the full results at the link above and we’ve summarised the key rankings below.