The Top 71 Slowest and Fastest UK Cities for Broadband Speed

A new analysis of 149,187 consumer broadband ISP speed tests claims to have identified the top fastest and slowest cities across the United Kingdom. For example, Canterbury (22Mbps) in Kent is named as the slowest city for the second consecutive year, while the fastest was found to be Lichfield (359Mbps) in Staffordshire.

The data, which was gathered during a 12-month period by Broadband Genie using the BroadbandUK speed test solution, only included cities that had a minimum of 150 speed tests in the area from residential connections. Cities were then ranked from fastest to slowest on weighted broadband speed, which requires a little more explanation below.

In order to calculate the weighted broadband speed in each area, the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile (median) was taken from all locations for both download and upload speed. Percentile download and upload speeds were then calculated into an average using a 1:8:1 weighted ratio (i.e. an attempt to emphasise and represent what the majority of customers experience daily). The final ‘weighted speed’ is based on an 80/20% split of download and upload speed.

As usual, it’s necessary to point out that speedtest based studies like this don’t tell you the whole story and are more a reflection of what connections or packages consumers have taken than the actual underlying availability of faster networks. On top of that, the study appears to have included tests from both fixed broadband and mobile broadband connections, which are obviously two very different sides of the internet connectivity market.

Consumer awareness, or lack thereof, can also impact the adoption of faster packages. 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). But the study does at least attempt to balance against some of this with its weighting system.

Finally, such studies can also be influenced by other factors too – ones that can be quite opaque to speed tests, such as poor home wiring, local (home) network congestion, any limitations of the remote speed tester itself and slow WiFi performance etc. In short, take these results with a pinch of salt, although it’s worth remembering that all the listed locations will share these same caveats.

Just to underline some of these points, the study notes that the slowest named city of Canterbury “currently lacks the otherwise widely available Virgin Media and almost a third (30%) of premises don’t have access to full fibre broadband“. But that still means that over 70% of premises could access gigabit broadband speeds if they wanted, often via either Openreach (dominant coverage), Netomnia (YouFibre), nexfibre (Virgin Media) or OFNL, which isn’t bad. For example, the areas covered by YouFibre can access speeds of up to 7-8Gbps!

Fastest and Slowest 71 UK Cities for Broadband