A new study based on data collected from 250,000 broadband ISP speed tests, which was conducted over a 90 day period, has concluded that the fastest time of day for web browsing is 2am, when the average download speed is 7Mbps, while the slowest time is 8pm when a relatively sluggish 4.73Mbps is the average.

The Top10.com statistics will not come as much of a shock because most people have always known that broadband performance, which is part of a shared "best efforts" UK infrastructure, drops at times of high demand (e.g. when people jump online after coming home from work in the afternoon). If all our broadband connections offered dedicated levels of bandwidth then end-users could expected to pay upwards of £100 per month for many existing packages; shared bandwidth keeps prices low.

In one of our recent news articles from last month we noted that, on average, the big UK ISPs tend to be approximately 15-30% faster during the low overnight hours from midnight to 8am than in the busy evening periods when their networks are under the most strain (here).

Only Sky Broadband and O2 ( Be Broadband ) appeared to have a fairly stable level of performance regardless of time. By contrast one of the fastest providers, Virgin Media UK, typically sees averages of around 10Mbps during late night and daytime periods; this drops to roughly 8.3Mbps in the afternoons.

Some ISPs will also impose tougher Traffic Management and Shaping measures to help balance the load during busy periods, although this can sometimes have a detrimental effect on popular services like video streaming, p2p and multiplayer gaming.