Cul de sac? It’s web super highway

IT’S an unassuming cul de sac in a quiet town, but Darwin Street is said to have the fastest broadband in the country.

Internet users in the street in Livingston, West Lothian, can get speeds of up to 182 megabits per second (Mbps), more than triple the UK average speed of 54.2Mbps.

In comparison, the worst areas for broadband speed in Scotland are Canisbay, near Wick, Caithness, where some users get speeds of only 0.39Mbps, along with Duiletter in Glendaruel, near Colintraive, Argyll, at 0.46Mbps, according to new research. In UK terms, they rank fifth and sixth respectively in the listings of poorest Mbps speeds, under tests carried out by the public.

The slowest broadband in the UK, with an average download speed of 0.22Mbps, is found in Kingsclere, Huntington, in York, according to data collated by price comparison service uSwitch.com.

It found a fifth of homes struggle with speeds of less than 10Mbps and one in ten crawls along below 5Mbps. In Kingsclere it would take more than 65 hours to download a two-hour HD film on Netflix, with Darwin Street residents taking less than five minutes to download the same film.

Not all were convinced, with one woman living in Darwin Street saying: ‘My daughter and son don’t get a signal in their rooms and the speed isn’t great.’

Superfast broadband is now available to 95 per cent of the country. However, uSwitch found that only six in ten believe they can access it in their local area.