The first quarter of 2015 has seen the average Internet download speed for the largest seven national home broadband ISPs in the United Kingdom crawl up from 24Mbps at the end of 2014 to 24.72Mbps now, while the average for the country’s primary Mobile Broadband operators reached 14.42Mbps (up from 11.71Mbps in Q4 2014).<\/p>\n
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As usual some providers, such as BT<\/a> and Virgin Media<\/a> in particular, tend to perform better for download performance because they have a higher number of subscribers taking “superfast broadband<\/em>” connections and this affects the average.<\/p>\n Naturally Virgin Media<\/a> continues to deliver the fastest download speeds (54.17Mbps<\/strong>) because they’re urban focused and their entry-level cable package is a 50Mbps service. By comparison the other big ISPs have to cater for rural areas with slower ADSL<\/a> lines, as well as faster ‘up to’ 80Mbps FTTC<\/a> lines, which will hinder their performance.<\/p>\n But Virgin’s cable network isn’t perfect and indeed their average upstream performance (6.63Mbps) isn’t as strong as the ‘up to’ 10-20Mbps capability of some FTTC<\/a> lines, which allows BT<\/a>, Zen Internet<\/a> and PlusNet<\/a> to all etch out a small lead over the cable operator.<\/p>\n Generally the big home broadband ISPs have all shown a gradual improvement over their score at the end of last year. Since then Virgin has announced a major network expansion to 17 million premises by 2020, plus a trial of DOCSIS<\/a> 3.1<\/strong> technology (here<\/a>), and BT<\/a> has pledged to roll-out G.fast<\/a> <\/strong>speeds of 500Mbps<\/strong> to “most homes<\/em>” over the next decade (here<\/a>). On top of that the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK<\/a> programme is continuing to push faster connectivity into more areas, thus speeds should continue to improve.<\/p>\n