Umlaut Study Names Virgin Media as Fastest UK Broadband ISP

A new benchmark study from telecoms analyst firm Umlaut, which tested and measured fixed broadband connectivity in the United Kingdom over a period of 6 months, has awarded their overall “Best in Test” certificate to Virgin Media (VMO2) after they came top for both download and upload performance.

The analysis is based on crowdsourced performance data, which is said to focus on revealing the “real user experience” and involved the collection of 112 million data samples, collected from 597,027 broadband lines.

However, Umlaut’s previous studies, which focused upon mobile connectivity, were able to extract test data from background diagnosis processes that had been built into thousands of Android apps. But adopting that same method for fixed broadband lines (here) is less effective and will expose their data collection to problems in the local home network, such as slow WiFi, as well as any limitations of the mobile device itself. Not ideal. We also don’t know what package each tester was on, but then that’s perhaps an unrealistic expectation for most such studies.

Nevertheless, the limitations of this study will at least apply to all fixed broadband ISPs, although we do recommend that our readers take these results with a pinch of salt. On top of that, the study only appears to have gauged the performance of the market’s biggest ISPs, including Virgin Media, BT, Vodafone, EE, TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and Plusnet.

Overall, Virgin Media scooped the “Best in Test” award, as well as the award for “Best rated user download speed” and “Best rated user upload speed“. The full results can be found below, although some of the more granular performance scores seem to lack much explanation (e.g. we’re not sure what kind of latency testing hails from “Egoshooter class“?).