UK’s street with slowest broadband named
A new study conducted by comparison website uSwitch.com has revealed the country’s fastest and slowest streets for broadband ISP download speeds.
According to the research, from data compiled from 279,186 consumer speed tests, that Greenmeadows Park in Bamfurlong had the UK’s slowest download rate of 0.14Mbps, whilst just an hour’s drive away, Abdon Avenue in Birmingham was the fastest at 265.89Mbps.
The survey polled 148,013 unique IP addresses in 29,816 postcodes to conduct reliable speed tests. To qualify as an included street, a minimum of three unique IP addresses and at least 10 residential properties were required as part of each postcode.
The country’s average speed was found to be at 46.2Mbps, but 26.3 per cent of homes struggled to reach speeds of even 10Mbps, which is the minimum set by the government’s forthcoming Broadband USO initiative. A startling one-in-eight receive speeds less than 5Mbps.
However, nearly a third of homes now access speeds of 30Mbps or more, which is up 22 per cent from just three years ago.
Broadband spokesman for uSwitch, Dani Warner, said: "It's almost comical that it would take someone in Bamfurlong more than 100 hours to download a two-hour HD film yet someone living just an hour's drive away on Abdon Avenue in Birmingham can download the same film in just over four minutes.
"Awareness of fibre broadband availability continues to be the biggest hurdle to people getting faster download speeds. Over a third of the slowest streets have access to superfast speeds, so people living there have no need to be crawling along on completely unusable internet services."
The South West of Britain was recorded to have five of the country’s fastest streets, including in Dorset, Cornwall and Wiltshire, and nine of the slowest were recorded in South Yorkshire, Scotland and Merseyside.
uSwitch claimed that more and more users were gaining access to superfast broadband speeds in a span of just three years, but believed the benefiting areas were still a “postcode lottery”.
