Revealed – the UK’s Worst Areas and ISPs for Evening Broadband Speed Drops
A new study from Broadband Genie has analysed 144,509 broadband speed tests over a 12-month period to find the best and worst locations and ISPs in the UK where your internet download speed drops at peak times. Overall the report finds that Wigan experienced the biggest drop at peak times (average fall of -55%), while Airband saw the biggest fall for ISPs (-45%).
The issue of peak time congestion is not a new one, although its impacts will vary between specific locations, broadband packages and service providers. Residential broadband services typically share capacity between many users in order to keep the price you pay low, but this does sometimes mean that connections may suffer a performance loss when demand rises (e.g. for consumers, that’s when everybody is home from work/school in the evenings).
The flip side of this is that if all lines had guaranteed uncontended speeds, like dedicated business / Ethernet packages with strict Service Level Agreements (SLA), then you’d pay significantly more for your broadband service. So as ever ISPs have a careful balancing act to perform between provisioning enough capacity to keep users happy and keeping the service affordable.
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In addition, it’s important to understand that web-based speed tests don’t only reflect the capabilities of your broadband provider, since they can also be impacted by issues that occur within your home network, as well as on the speed testers own servers.
For example, during peak times there will also be more demand on your home WiFi, which some routers might struggle to deliver at the full speed. Equally, the performance of the speed testing servers themselves may also drop, since more users may be hitting their servers to run tests. Suffice to say, the picture is often more complex than it may first appear, so take these figures with a pinch of salt.
5 worst towns for broadband congestion
| Rank | Town | Off-peak average download (Mbps) | Peak average download (Mbps) | Peak time difference |
| 1 | Wigan | 167 | 75 | -55% |
| 2 | Galashiels | 135 | 77 | -43% |
| 3 | Harrogate | 133 | 81 | -39% |
| 4 | Exeter | 55 | 34 | -37% |
| 5 | Rochester | 195 | 127 | -35% |
5 best towns for broadband congestion
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| Rank | Town | Off-peak average download (Mbps) | Peak average download (Mbps) | Peak time difference |
| 1 | Newport | 60 | 111 | 87% |
| 2 | Oxford | 90 | 139 | 54% |
| 3 | Glasgow | 106 | 162 | 53% |
| 4 | Blackburn | 126 | 188 | 50% |
| 5 | Cambridge | 93 | 135 | 45% |
Broadband congestion by region
| Rank | Region | Off-peak average download (Mbps) | Peak average download (Mbps) | Peak time difference |
| 1 | Scotland | 108 | 124 | 15% |
| 2 | Wales | 101 | 116 | 14% |
| 3 | East of England | 108 | 118 | 9% |
| 4 | East Midlands | 122 | 132 | 9% |
| 5 | North East England | 117 | 125 | 7% |
| 6 | West Midlands | 125 | 134 | 7% |
| 7 | South East | 121 | 127 | 5% |
| 8 | Yorkshire & Humber | 119 | 120 | 0% |
| 9 | London | 142 | 142 | 0% |
| 10 | North West England | 115 | 113 | -2% |
| 11 | Northern Ireland | 176 | 163 | -8% |
| 12 | South West | 105 | 89 | -15% |
Broadband congestion by provider
| Rank | Provider | Off-peak average download (Mbps) | Peak average download (Mbps) | Peak time difference |
| 1 | Cuckoo | 136 | 246 | 81% |
| 2 | Zen Internet | 139 | 171 | 23% |
| 3 | YouFibre | 311 | 341 | 10% |
| 4 | Fibrus | 187 | 203 | 9% |
| 5 | Vodafone Mobile Broadband | 29 | 31 | 8% |
| 6 | Trooli | 331 | 356 | 7% |
| 7 | Plusnet | 69 | 72 | 5% |
| 8 | BT | 102 | 103 | 2% |
| 9 | toob | 360 | 365 | 2% |
| 10 | EE | 84 | 85 | 0% |
| 11 | Virgin Media | 232 | 233 | 0% |
| 12 | Vodafone | 139 | 139 | 0% |
| 13 | Hyperoptic | 195 | 194 | -1% |
| 14 | TalkTalk | 49 | 48 | -2% |
| 15 | Three UK | 59 | 57 | -4% |
| 16 | Sky Broadband | 91 | 86 | -5% |
| 17 | Gigaclear | 176 | 166 | -6% |
| 18 | Hey! Broadband | 251 | 233 | -7% |
| 19 | CommunityFibre | 388 | 344 | -11% |
| 20 | KCOM | 151 | 134 | -11% |
| 21 | EE Mobile Home Broadband | 34 | 29 | -13% |
| 22 | Boundless | 154 | 115 | -25% |
| 23 | Brsk | 282 | 182 | -36% |
| 24 | Airband | 87 | 47 | -45% |
At this point it’s worth noting that BT, EE, NOW Broadband (NOW TV), PlusNet, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse Virgin Media and Zen Internet are all signatories to the regulator’s Code of Practice for Broadband ISP Speeds, which requires them to provide customers with clearer information about service speeds at peak times and a right to exit your contract, penalty free, when that falls below a minimum level and they can’t fix it within 30 days.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Er…. Have they got the graphs for town, region & ISP the wrong way round or am I being dumb. It appears that the performance at peak times is better than off-peak? Oh and Cuckoo have got the biggest difference between on & off peak times – what a surprise!
Yeah, some more information would be helpful. How is the peak performance better than off-peak? If off-peak is slower, shouldn’t we call off-peak peak, and peak off-peak by definition?
When they talk about Peak and Off-peak in the tables, it’s a reference to the time periods they’ve defined, as noted in the blue box.
I take it to mean they suffer off peak congestion.
It feels like a graph of speed, with perhaps a test per hour would be clearer.
One areas/ISPs peak may not be anothers, especially if the area/ISP is business heavy
Certainly what I’d want to know is the best speed, and the worst speed for each Area/ISP
Hi Mark,
I saw the definitions of off/peak in the article, but judging from the results of their measurements, I think they defined the periods incorrectly.
There is no Brsk anymore .
true theyve merged the ISPs… but their (netomnia’s) network equipment still identify as brsk for those areas.
so on the tests they will see listed youfibre and brsk as separate.
In the last year I was with Plusnet, evenings did seem to slow down sometimes, I was only on around 36Mb/s anyway, but sometimes it seemed to be slower.
For the most part it did not really make much difference, but sometimes even streaming would buffer.
I still think they did it on purpose to try to force me to fibre.
Perhaps some ISPs have large numbers of business customers who tend not to be hogging the network during peak evening 4-hour slot — so there’s spare capacity?
Errr . . I didn’t know Newport and Blackburn were university towns . . . . . and aren’t the columns for these tables misplaced i.e. average off-peak showing as peak ?
Interesting how “BroadbandGenie” make some glaring omissions in their data. Missing several FTTP Altnets.
Proudly declaring themselves as a reliable source of information, while displaying incorrect “best offerings” for areas, omitting several key players etc. Their customer facing postcode checker they’re using also omits specific companies, claiming no FTTP coverage at all in serviced postcodes at times…
A sleek UI, but as others have mentioned, their table formatting is nonsensical at times.
Okay, just did some digging. Looks to be some heavy partner bias potentially. That’s misleading and quite a shame.