Broadband Speed Test Results for March 2016

The first quarter of 2016 is over and spring is here and its all change at the top of the main table.

The mean and medians from Hyperoptic and Gigaclear have dropped and looking at the results this looks to be an effect of the popularity of the entry level speed products. In terms of speed performance Virgin Media has been pretty static though as the those on the 150 Mbps and faster products grow from the current 3% this may change quickly and en eventual DOCSIS 3.1 deployment with the usual ‘free’ speed upgrades would change things drastically. Virgin Media has embraced the ‘free’ upgrade culture to ensure even that end-user lethargy does not let them slip down the speed tables compared to BT.

Congratulations to B4RN who cover a large geographic footprint that is sparsely populated but usually don’t feature due to the small sample size but with a higher than usual number of tests from different areas they have made the main table this month.

Those providers where we see enough tests to consider for the top 25 table but did not make the grade are Demon (5.2 Mbps median), Timico (5.1 Mbps), BT WiFi (4.4 Mbps), TalkTalk Business (3.3 Mbps) and Post Office (2.5 Mbps).

The joy of observed data is that you see fluctuations from month to month, so a month or with drops of 0.1 to 0.5 Mbps are little cause for concern, but the upload speeds on Plusnet have dropped from a high of 13.8 Mbps in September 2014 to the current 6 Mbps purely because of the policy change to sell the 2 Mbps upload product rather than up to 19 Mbps upload service (saving the provider a small amount per month). The profile of tests suggests 35% of Plusnet customers are on the up to 2 Mbps upload service at this time and its a growing proportion each month. At TalkTalk who have sold the up to 2 Mbps (up to 38 Mbps download) product as their only entry level FTTC for years its 73% on the entry level service with the remainder electing to buy the premium up to 76 download with up to 19 Mbps upload service.

We don’t usually cover latency because even though the UK is small geography still plays a large part but looking at the product sets overall the mean latency figures are FTTH 42ms, FTTC 56ms, Virgin Media cable 72ms, wireless 109ms, ADSL 136 ms, mobile 141ms and satellite 876 ms. Rural FTTC manages an average of 56 ms and rural ADSL 166ms.

Almost a static picture with regards to ADSL/ADSL2+ performance and for those who don’t trust mean and median figures, its worth highlighting that for ADSL overall 10% of the tests we see are under 1.1 Mbps, with the top 10% managing 14.6 Mbps.

The overall UK average (mean) was 21.9 Mbps down and 4.1 Mbps up, but this is across all devices tested, if we remove phones (26.8%) and tablets (18.2%) then the average increased to 25 Mbps down 4.5 Mbps up (bottom 10% 1.7 Mbps and top 10% 57.1 Mbps download) and showing the effect that Wi-Fi can have and why it can be important for those embracing nights in with Netflix to ensure the main TV is using an Ethernet connection to get the best possible speeds.