Peak and off peak performance at the largest UK broadband providers in March 2018

A few days later in the month due to the weekend and pleothra of other data we have been crunching in April but our analysis of the largest six broadband service providers and their single and multiple download performance during the day and evening is now available.

Most broadband speed tests do not carry out such a congestion sensitive test, the tbbx1 (single download) speed that you get from our test gives a good idea of your connections video streaming capability where as the httpx6 (multiple downloads) gives you a better idea of how much bandwidth is available in total on your connection. On a good broadband connection and when things like Wi-Fi are working well the two tests should be very similar and while the summary results here cannot predict what you will see it does give you a very good idea if your result is good or bad compared to others.

This monthly round-up is the only time we don’t split the results into the providers various products, and since the popularity of the faster products varies from provider to provider you should not use the raw speed figures when judging a provider, but rather look at the difference between the two as a percentage. Virgin Media invariably has the largest gap in percentage terms and while it is possible to say that the average median download speed 52.7 Mbps is more than enough for streaming 4K video based on the various comments from customers there are plenty of people where variations in performance are such that streaming a whole file without buffering is a dream.

The big jump in upload speeds during the evening period for EE highlights how the population of people testing varies across the day and with EE also having around 45% of its customers on ADSL/ADSL2+ products still the median figures have tendency to jump suddenly based on the ratio of FTTC to ADSL/ADSL2+ testing.

Virgin Media saw a 0.3 improvement in the stability measurement compared to February (moving the median from Grade C to Grade B) which is based on the multiple download test, suggesting there has been some improvement in throughput in the last month. Also now that EE is sending out re-badged BT Home Hubs as its broadband router if we see the stability figure shifting towards that Grade A of sister providers Plusnet and BT we will know that the reason for the poor figure was the  Brightbox router family.