Top 10 UK Cities with the Biggest Gap in Broadband Speeds (Fastest vs Slowest)

A new report has used data from 16,500 consumer speed tests to reveal the ten UK cities with the biggest performance gap between those with the fastest broadband ISP speeds and those with the slowest. Glasgow was the “most unequal city“, with its fastest speeds (840.4Mbps) being 866 times quicker than its slowest (0.97Mbps).

The study also examined the shortest distance between a city’s fastest and slowest areas, which saw Brighton come top – “just” 1.2 miles separates the address in the Patcham area, where a top speed of 419.5Mbps was measured (this is said to be the “highest average speed“), with the bottom speed of 4.4Mbps being recorded a short walk away in the Preston Park ward.

The Uswitch.com research is somewhat unusual, and we’re not entirely sure how useful it is or what it’s trying to say, since in any given area there will always be those who choose to remain on older connections, even when faster connections are available to take. Consumer speed testing based studies like this don’t accurately reflect the actual underlying availability of faster networks in each area, which is a key point.

A number of factors can also impact the take-up of faster connections, such as higher prices, fear of switching, as well as a lack of general awareness (i.e. people not knowing that it exists in their area) or interest / desire for the new connectivity (e.g. those with only basic needs may feel less inclined to upgrade).

One other factor to consider, which will become much more relevant in the future as full fibre grows, is that a number of new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks (e.g. Openreach) offer a special slow-speed (e.g. 0.5Mbps) tier that is designed to cater for those customers who merely seek a basic landline phone replacement service (VoIP doesn’t need much speed to work). This could add to the problems of assigning context to this sort of data.

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, limitations of the tester / testing service itself and slow WiFi performance etc. In addition, it’s unclear whether they filtered mobile connections out.

In short, we’re not sure how useful any of the data below really is, but take these results with a big pinch of salt. But it is reasonable to say that there is a large and growing gap between customers benefiting from ultrafast speeds and those who are getting the bare minimum, although this is nothing new and perhaps shows better in other studies of network availability.

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