A new study by Pando Networks, which spent the first half of 2011 tracking the broadband ISP speeds of approximately 400,000 internet users in the UK, has claimed that the average British download speed is just 481KBps (KiloBytes per second); that's about 3.85Mbps in the more familiar data currency of Megabits per second. ISP Be Broadband ( O2 ) also came out top for speed and reliability.

The result is significantly lower than most other surveys, including Ofcom's latest July 2011 report that posted a figure of 6.8Mbps for the same thing (here). Sadly Pando, which provides performance enhancing internet based content delivery solutions, fails to detail its testing methodology.

Pando's report also discovered many of the same variations in performance that Ofcom and other reports have, which was in with specific regard to the growing Digital Divide between urban and rural areas.

Top 3 Fastest UK Towns and Cities
1. Brighton (1,010KBps)
2. Ware (909KBps)
3. Stevenage (805KBps)

Top 3 Slowest UK Towns and Cities
1. Avon (130KBps)
2. Loddington (151KBps)
3. Swithland (169KBps)

Top 3 Fastest UK Capital Cities
1. Edinburgh (653KBps)
2. London (570KBps)
3. Cardiff (494KBps)

To help illustrate this Pando has been kind enough to summarise its data through the use of a Google based interactive map, which we've embedded below.


As expected the report also found "wide disparities" between the most popular home broadband ISPs. Be Broadband ( O2 ) unexpectedly took the top spot with average downloads of 594KBps (4.75Mbps), which goes against almost every other study where Virgin Media's cable platform is usually well ahead of the pack. Virgin Media still managed to come 2nd but with a score of just 552KBps (4.42 Mbps).

Pando's Top Fastest British ISPs
1. Be Broadband ( O2 ) - 594KBps
2. Virgin Media - 552KBps
3. Sky Broadband - 534KBps
4. Entanet - 465KBps
5. TalkTalk - 450KBps
6. BT - 399KBps

Curiously there's no mention of Orange. It's also noted that only 77% of the downloads started by BT customers were actually completed, which the report claims "suggests problems with connectivity or frustration with the slow speeds". By contrast BE customers completed 84% of their downloads and were thus labelled most reliable ISP.

The above data would not be collectable by an ordinary speedtest and suggests that Pando could be leveraging its content delivery network to discover the results. A significantly larger content delivery operator, Akamai, does something similar and recently reported that average UK broadband ISP download speeds had increased to 4.6Mbps (here).