The Top 5 Fastest and Slowest Parts of the UK for Broadband

A new analysis of 265,572 consumer broadband ISP speed tests claims to have revealed the top fastest and slowest five areas, as well as five cities, across the United Kingdom. For example, the village of Halkirk in the Highlands of Scotland was named as the slowest area (2.8Mbps), while Canterbury came out as the slowest city (34.3Mbps).

The data, which was gathered during a 12-month period, represents the first annual Broadband Genie Speed Index report. In order for a place to qualify, a minimum number of speed tests coming from a unique IP address was taken to reflect the population size of the city, town or village. For example, 23 tests were taken from Halkirk (slowest village) and 397 from Canterbury (slowest city).

As usual, it’s necessary to point out that speedtest based studies like this won’t tell you the whole story, as they’re more a reflection of what connections or packages consumers have taken than the actual underlying availability of faster networks or their capabilities (i.e. superfast networks cover around 98% of UK premises and gigabit speeds are at around 77%).

Put another way, the slowest locations are actually those that don’t appear on such lists because they can’t get a stable enough internet connection to even run a test (if any at all), while the fastest are those where it’s possible to order speeds of 8-10Gbps for homes from some specific alternative network providers (e.g. B4RN, YouFibre).

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 (e.g. higher prices, being stuck in a long 18-24 month contract term or a simple lack of need / desire for anything faster).

Finally, such studies can 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 / cheaper tier), local (home) network congestion and slow WiFi performance etc. In short, take these results with a big pinch of salt.

Study Results

Overall, the village of Halkirk in the Scottish Highlands was named the UK’s “slowest broadband area“, with residents receiving average download speeds of just 2.8Mbps (note: there’s no consideration for uploads in this study). Meanwhile, on the other side of Scotland, Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire enjoyed the fastest speeds, with an impressive average of 409Mbps per household

However, we did have a quick look at Halkirk, which revealed that most of the community was covered by a nearby Openreach street cabinet serving FTTC (VDSL2) and thus most of the area seemed able to take speeds of around 30-50Mbps. The fact that it only scored 2.8Mbps suggests that those still on slower ADSL2+ lines or in outlying areas may be skewing the results.

In terms of cities, Canterbury came out as the slowest city (34.3Mbps), while Belfast was named the fastest (152Mbps) – nearly twice those of the Welsh capital, Cardiff (79Mbps), 76% faster than London (87Mbps) and 58% more than Edinburgh (96Mb). The reason why Canterbury performs so poorly is because they’ve only recently started to get FTTP coverage via Openreach and Netomnia, which covers over half of all premises.

Slowest areas for broadband in the UK

Fastest areas for broadband in the UK

Top five slowest cities for broadband in the UK

Top five fastest cities for broadband in the UK