Virgin Media, Fibrus and Vodafone Top nPerf UK Broadband Speed Survey
European benchmarking firm nPerf has just published the results from their annual 2024 crowdsourced study into UK fixed broadband ISP performance, which finds that subscribers of Virgin Media, Fibrus and Vodafone enjoyed the best internet connection performances over the past year.
The nPerf study is said to be based on thousands of tests carried out exclusively by the operators’ end-customers – using tools on both their website and via dedicated mobile apps, which are said to reflect the “real experience of the general public in the United Kingdom” on the various internet networks.
As usual, there are caveats to this sort of data, such as the fact that it could be impacted by any limitations of the devices being used, slow Wi-Fi networks, the customer’s choice of package speed or the remote testing servers themselves, but those issues are at least shared by all of the operators in this study.
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In addition, nPerf’s report, which covers the whole of last year (01/01/2023 to 31/12/2023), only seems to include BT (inc. EE and Plusnet), Fibrus, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Vodafone. But quite why Fibrus is included and others with a larger customer base (e.g. Hyperoptic, CommunityFibre, Zen Internet and KCOM) are not remains unclear.
Otherwise, the key results can be found below, although lumping BT, EE and Plusnet together does confuse matters a little bit. We’re also unsure why Fibrus, which is an FTTP-only provider, has different speeds in two tables (fixed line general vs fixed line FTTH) – some context appears to be missing.
In addition, it’s noted that the average fixed download speed in the United Kingdom (195Mbps) also managed to exceed that of countries like Sweden (148Mbps), Germany (113Mbps) or Austria (106.5Mbps). But nPerf’s full report is very limited and doesn’t provide a country-to-country comparison.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Unless you compare like for like products within a comparison this all seems very much a waste of analytical effort. The product mix a customer base signs up for is critical here.
Then the use of mobile apps really kills the quality by adding WiFi performance into the mix.
Even with FTTH/FTTP it’s not symmetrical? well, they can’t blame capacity” on that
These numbers don’t work for me.
BT Group upload 183.75 on FTTP when only the business 1000/220 package offers higher seems wrong. No chance that’s correct for actual ‘broadband’ services.
VM upload 162.13 on FTTP when they’ve only just started selling 200 up seems wrong.
How is Virgin showing >100Mbps average upload on FTTH when they only just announced products with >100Mbps upload speeds?
Their gig1 has had 100Mb upload for a while now
That’s my point, if their maximum upload tier was 100Mbps how can the average upload possibly be 162Mbps?
If it looks like BS and smells like BS, it’s probably…
Unless the “FTTH Fixed Internet connections” includes a sizeable proportion of leased lines, those upload numbers are clearly bunk.
AFAIK, BT consumer and business don’t sell a 1000/220 service at all. Just wholesale.
Only Vodafone is plausible, and even then only if the majority of tests came from Cityfibre lines rather than Openreach ones; but Openreach has at least 4 times the footprint.