UK’S average broadband speed jumps 18% in just one year

The UK’S median average broadband speed rose from 50.4Mbps to 59.4Mbps between 2021 and 2022 – an increase of 18 per cent. This is a much bigger jump than between 2020 and 2021, when speeds increased by just 0.4Mbps to 50.4Mbps. Upload speeds have also increased, from 9.8Mbps to 10.7Mbps.

The figures come from Ofcom’s annual Home Broadband Performance report (www.snipca. com/43823), which also shows that more than nine in 10 of UK homes (91 per cent) now have ‘super-fast’ broadband of 30Mbps and above, a rise from 85 per cent last year.

However, the gap between average speeds in urban (62.1Mbps) and rural areas (39.4Mbps) widened during the same period, largely as a result of new full-fibre services being rolled out across towns and cities.

Virgin Media’s 1.1Gbps service provided the fastest median average speed, at 1,138Mbps. Talktalk’s highest average of 452Mbps was on its 500Mbps service; BT’S 304Mbps was on its 300Mbps package; and Sky’s 150Mbps came on its 145Mbps deal.

Ofcom also tested what speed was needed to reliably stream video from Netflix. It found that ADSL+2 connections, which have a maximum speed of 24Mbps, streamed video smoothly 68 per cent of the time.

This rose to 98 per cent for speeds above 36Mbps, and 100 per cent above 50Mbps.

Ofcom’s research comes from analysing internet use in March in several thousand homes. Residents were given a monitoring unit that connects to both their router and their home network. This makes the results highly accurate because the unit overcomes any network congestion or slow Wi-fi.