The Top 7 Fastest National UK Home Broadband and Mobile ISPs Q1 2015

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 countrys primary Mobile Broadband operators reached 14.42Mbps (up from 11.71Mbps in Q4 2014).

As usual some providers, such as BT and Virgin Media in particular, tend to perform better for download performance because they have a higher number of subscribers taking superfast broadband connections and this affects the average.

Naturally Virgin Media continues to deliver the fastest download speeds (54.17Mbps) because theyre 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 lines, as well as faster up to 80Mbps FTTC lines, which will hinder their performance.

But Virgins cable network isnt perfect and indeed their average upstream performance (6.63Mbps) isnt as strong as the up to 10-20Mbps capability of some FTTC lines, which allows BT, Zen Internet and PlusNet to all etch out a small lead over the cable operator.

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 3.1 technology (here), and BT has pledged to roll-out G.fast speeds of 500Mbps to most homes over the next decade (here). On top of that the Governments Broadband Delivery UK programme is continuing to push faster connectivity into more areas, thus speeds should continue to improve.

The Fastest UK ISPs Average Download Speed (Megabits per second)

Average Speed = 24.72Mbps

The Fastest UK ISPs Average Upload Speed

Average Speed = 5.84Mbps

At this point we should say that the above ISPs arent the fastest home broadband operators and if we were to expand our list in order to include niche companies, which often only focus upon smaller or more specific areas, then wed immediately need to include true fibre optic (FTTH/P) operators like Hyperoptic and Gigaclear (there are others but most dont produce enough data to be included).

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The Top 7 Fastest National UK Home Broadband and Mobile ISPs Q1 2015