Revealed, the Scottish street with the fastest internet speed in UK

ON the surface, the pace of change appears to be no different on Benford Avenue from any other modest street of former council houses.

But residents of this otherwise unremarkable address in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, have a speedy secret – they can boast the fastest broadband in the whole of the UK.

In fact, their internet service is 260 times faster than Britain’s slowest, Thorpe Lane in Suffolk’s Trimley St Martin, where downloading a two-hour film takes more than 21 hours – longer than a flight to Australia.

By contrast, the residents of Benfield

‘Thickness of walls can slow connections’

enjoy average broadband speeds of more than 177.1mbps and can download a two-hour film in less than five minutes.

For those in Thorpe Lane, it is impossible to use video-streaming services like Skype in high-definition, and even checking Facebook can be a frustrating experience. Their broadband speeds average only 0.68 megabits per second (mbps) – 53 times slower than for the average British household.

Consumer website uSwitch, which carried out the research based on a million speed tests for 76,400 different internet addresses, said it was shocked by the range – and the sluggish internet access in some parts of the country.

Broadband expert Ewan TaylorGibson said: ‘It is astonishing to think you could fly to Sydney in the time it takes to download a film on the UK’s slowest street.

‘Reasons for such sluggish broadband speeds can vary and can include a user’s distance from the nearest exchange or difficulAvenue ties with the property itself – thickness of walls, for example, can affect wireless connections.’

Benford Avenue is linked to Virgin Media’s fibre broadband network, which boasts potential speeds of 300mbps.

At the other end of the scale, Thorpe Lane is quite a distance from the nearest phone exchange, which is linked to the web via oldfashioned copper-based wires.

Sheskin Gardens in Londonderry and Crosswood Road in Swindon, which took second and third place, are also linked to fibre and enjoy speeds of 158.5mbps and 158.4mbps respectively.

And less than five miles away from Benford Avenue, another Motherwell street – Airbles Crescent – also makes the list of the top ten British streets for speedy broadband.

Benfield Avenue residents voiced surprise that they had topped the list. William Perkins, 73, said: ‘I’m always happy with the speed. I just hope we can keep the standards we’ve got used to.’

Perhaps surprisingly, there is not one London street in the top ten. Chestnut Drive in Pinner, Greater London, ranks at number 13 with average speeds of 134mbps.

uSwitch found a fifth of homes in Britain have broadband that limps along at less than 10mbps, while nearly one in ten have to make do with less than 5mbps.

However, the company urged people who are dissatisfied with their service to let their providers know – and switch if necessary.