BT, Sky and Virgin Media beaten - so which broadband provider is the UK's best?

12 December 2023 , 07:30

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Best and worst UK broadband (Image: GETTY)

BT, Sky and Virgin Media might be the most popular UK providers but it seems they are not the fastest. The latest speed stats have just been posted online by the team at Opensignal and there's one very clear winner when it comes to the best downloads. Community Fibre, which supplies around one million homes in London, has been crowned top dog for internet speeds with the firm offering its users an average pace of 159.6Mbps.

Compare that to Plusnet's 35.4Mbps average and you can instantly see the difference with the BT-owned firm around four times slower.

Coming second in the overall speed league was Virgin Media (129.5Mbps) followed by Hyperoptic (119.2Mbps) and Gigaclear (109Mbps). Along Plusnet, other providers that came lower in the league include EE, TalkTalk and Sky with all of these hugely popular ISPs scoring below 42Mbps.

As well as the average score being revealed, Opensignal has also exposed the best firm for fastest peak download speeds. Once again it was Community Fibre getting the top spot with an average of 591Mbps.

Hyperoptic was 2nd (285.3Mbps) with Virgin 3rd (466.1Mbps). Both Plusnet and Sky were at the other end of the table with both of these suppliers scoring less than 200Mbps.

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Opensignal speed stats (OPENSIGNAL)

"London-based Community Fibre has the outright highest score across all three of Opensignal’s speed metrics (Broadband Download Speed, Broadband Peak Download Speed and Broadband Upload Speed), while also statistically tying for first place with rural-focused Gigaclear for Broadband Consistent Quality," Opensignal said in a post on its website.

"In addition, Community Fibre, Hyperoptic and Gigaclear are far ahead of the other analysed ISPs in terms of the average upload speeds observed by our users.

"However, cable/FTTP provider Virgin Media also performs strongly nationally, being the runner-up for Broadband Download Speed, Broadband Consistent Quality, Broadband Video Experience and sharing that distinction with Hyperoptic for Broadband Peak Download Speed."

Of course, one of the reasons firms such as Sky, BT and Plusnet have lower speeds is that they rely on a nationwide network which isn't fully connected to fibre cables just yet. Things are improving but many homes are still using ageing copper technology which simply can't keep pace.

"As might be expected, fibre-only players perform strongly when analysing our users’ experience nationally," OPensignal added.

So that's all the stats for speed but what about the quality of the network? Once again Community Fibre is in joint first place alongside Gigaclear with an Opensignal score of over 90. In second is Virgin Media (score 89), followed by Vodafone (score 87.5), Hyperoptic (score 86.1) and BT (score 84.8).

Coming in last place was Three Mobile. Opensignal says that it defines Broadband Quality using six performance indicators. These include download and upload speed, latency, packet loss, jitter and time to first byte.

Dave Snelling