A new uSwitch study has ranked the top 30 UK cities by their average Mobile Broadband (3G) download speed. The research, which was based on 30,000 anecdotal speed tests from Apple iPhone users with a special testing app, discovered that Portsmouth delivered the fastest speeds (3.554Mbps) and Wolverhampton was the slowest (2.463Mbps).

Meanwhile London, which is due to host the 2012 Olympic Games this summer, has the slowest average speeds of any of the UK's top 10 largest cities (by population). It managed an average speed of just 2.71Mbps, which also put it firmly into the bottom third of uSwitch's table.

City - Average Download Speed (Mbps)
Portsmouth - 3.554
Liverpool - 3.297
Stoke-on-Trent - 3.26
Nottingham - 3.19
Bradford - 3.124
York - 3.118
Glasgow - 3.117
Newcastle - 3.095
Sheffield - 3.057
Leeds - 3.057
Derby - 3.027
Wakefield - 3.004
Edinburgh - 2.944
Swansea - 2.943
Peterborough - 2.941
Bristol - 2.911
Cardiff - 2.906
Manchester - 2.841
Birmingham - 2.81
Aberdeen - 2.789
Brighton - 2.773
Southampton - 2.755
Sunderland - 2.749
London - 2.712
Oxford - 2.606
Coventry - 2.574
Leicester - 2.573
Hull - 2.572
Plymouth - 2.547
Wolverhampton - 2.463

All of the results appear to be well above Ofcom's May 2011 study of national Mobile Broadband speeds (here), which found that the average download speed was just 1.5Mbps (Megabits per second) - rising to 2.1Mbps in areas of "good 3G coverage".

A related January 2012 uSwitch survey of 1,027 Smartphone users' attitudes toward Mobile Broadband services also discovered that 39% were not happy with their speeds, 47% felt that coverage was "patchy" or "non existent" and 42% suffered daily problems with connections.

Overall the results merely serve to reinforce an already existing opinion of Mobile Broadband, which is best treated as a compliment and not a replacement for fixed line connectivity. At the same time services are improving and the forthcoming advent of 4G technology has the potential to change the market.

One crucial thing missing from this study is a breakdown of performance by individual operator. For example, it would have been interesting to see whether or not any operators delivered consistently slower performance across multiple cities.