UPDATE: We have learnt that this is rather inaccurate because they only tested some the largest ISP's. Epitiro, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions provider, has launched its own quarterly consumer ADSL broadband report. The first one issued has identified that AOL, BT, Demon, Orange and Virgin provided the UK’s top five consumer ADSL services in the second quarter of 2006:

Epitiro’s customer experience monitoring and competitor benchmarking solution ISP-I™ (pronounced “eye spy”) monitored the ADSL broadband services from all of the UK’s leading consumer Internet service providers. ISP-I™ periodically connected to the services from ten key geographic locations around the UK from April to June 2006.

Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro said, “Our consumer ADSL testing found that in terms of Internet performance, BT topped the overall rankings for the period April to June 2006. BT was also found to provide the fastest service as a percentage of its theoretical maximum.”

“Virgin, BT and AOL were the fastest services to actually connect to the Internet, while Pipex, Orange and BT were up to four times faster than the industry average at delivering email.”

The top five consumer ISP services in Q2 were ranked according to their Epitiro Consumer ADSL Internet Performance Index (IPI) Score. If a service was ranked as the best performer in every test throughout the period, it would have a performance score of 1.

1....¦ BT.......¦ 2.78
2....¦ Virgin...¦ 4.79
3....¦ Demon....¦ 5.00
4....¦ AOL......¦ 5.22
5....¦ Orange...¦ 5.23

New Consumer Industry Performance Tracker

The ADSL industry’s average IPI score for Q2 2006 is 4.72. This score provides a benchmark to track the performance and development of the consumer ADSL broadband industry into the future.

The Quarterly Consumer ADSL Report can be used to gauge the resilience of the Internet and of Internet services. The leading consumer ADSL services experienced 12,503 instances of connection failure from 948,411 attempts over the Q2 period - an average industry connection failure of 1.93 per cent.

Unfortunately the test doesn’t appear to check the quality of support, price or limitations of the various ISP’s (blocked ports, traffic management and bandwidth caps). Recommending an ISP purely on the basis of network performance would only be telling half the story. Nor is it clear how many UK ISP's were tested.