Research Reveals Fastest And Slowest Broadband Streets In UK

Some new research into broadband speeds in the UK has revealed the fastest and slowest streets in the country (once again).

Uswitch compiled this data from a million speed tests which have been run over a period of six months, and found that the slowest street was Williamson Road in Romney Marsh, Kent, which had an average download speed of just 0.54Mbps. As Uswitch noted, at that speed, a two hour HD movie would take 19 hours to download.

Williamson Road is actually 135 times slower than the fastest broadband street in the UK, Sandy Lane in Cannock, Staffordshire, which averaged 72.86Mbps.

The average speed for the whole of the UK, incidentally, is 22.8Mbps, which isn’t too shabby – but there are still areas like Williamson Road which are comparatively in the Stone Age, not the ‘Digital Age’.

23 per cent of the country, in fact, is on an average of less than 3Mbps, with a third (34 per cent) not managing to get above 5Mbps.

And Uswitch notes that broadband is something of a “postcode lottery” – three of the UK’s fastest streets, including the aforementioned top performer, are in Staffordshire, but it also hosts two of the slowest streets.

In terms of the overall country, there is a North-South divide, and the North is better off at least at the top end of the picture, as in the league table of the 30 fastest streets, the North has twice as many entrants.

Ewan Taylor-Gibson, broadband expert at uSwitch.com, commented: “More needs to be done to increase awareness of fibre availability and its benefits. Superfast broadband isn’t as expensive as some users might think, with prices averaging an extra £9 a month on top of standard broadband costs.

“A recent House of Lords report called for broadband to be defined as a public utility and voiced concerns about the delivery of superfast services. Terrible speeds can isolate people and take their toll on businesses, schools, even house prices. A nationwide rollout of fibre broadband to the furthest and most remote corners of the UK has never been more urgent.”