back to article Ofcom maps state of UK broadband

And the award for the UK's fastest average broadband speed goes to... Edinburgh, named today as the nation's best location for broadband performance by Ofcom. That said, its average speed as measured by the comms watchdog, 10.1Mb/s, isn't expecially impressive. Edinburgh is followed by Bristol (9.9Mb/s), Blackpool (9.5Mb/s), …

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  1. Bastard Operator From Hull
    Trollface

    LOVE this (hopefully) impartial data

    Karoo (in Hull) - "fastest UK intenet" - my arse.

    Care to comment?

  2. Oliver Mayes
    Headmaster

    "expecially impressive"

    My heartfelt contrafibularities on the use of such a cromulent word.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Vitani

    Woo

    North East Lincs, 9.1Mb/s? Awesome. Go go Grimsby!

    1. Dave Bell

      Why Grimsby?

      I think this is a sign of the rather coarse resolution of the map--whole counties for one thing--which means that NE Lincolnshire is dominated by Grimsby/Cleethorpes and the infrastructure installed for cable TV. Lincoln was, I think, also involved in that cable TV boom, but is lost in the vast area of Lincolnshire which is sparsely-populated rural.

      1. Vitani

        Indeed

        Most of North East Lincs has Diamond, erm, ntl, er Virgin Cable so that's probably why it's in the top-ten. I imagine if Lincoln city was taken as it's own "county" it would be up there too, but might be dragged down by the sheer amount of new houses in the city (including my own) which don't have access cable even though a house two doors down does (I'm not bitter or anything!!)

        Having moved from Grimsby to Lincoln (I know, I'm one of the lucky few who escaped) I do miss the nice fast speeds of cable, but one of the perks of ADSL is picking an ISP which doesn't throttle your connection when you try to download a load of games on Steam :o)

        4mb/s isn't _that_ bad ...

  4. rory alsop 1
    Thumb Down

    This amuses/depresses me

    My provider (Talk Talk) fails to get me anything above 1.3Mb/s - just west of Edinburgh, although they happily charge me for 8Mb/s as they say I could get faster speeds!

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Tricky.

      Well TalkTalk are only responsible for the MSAN in the exchange. They pay to maintain the MSAN and they've allowed your line to be plugged into a port. The length of your telephone line is the responsibility of Openreach who own it and you for choosing where you live :)

      But more seriously and trying to be objective about it:your low sync speed means a slight saving for TalkTalk if you have average usage patterns(*) but that might be offset by the increase in electricity used by the MSAN if it's operating at higher power levels to get the signal to reach you.

      I'd also assume that longer lines on average cost Openreach more money since there's more scope for trouble the longer a line is.

      But the real question is what can be done about your situation..and who should pay for it. Clearly you need FTTC (or even better FTTP) but someone has to pay for that. Whether that cost is born through our phone bills or taxes you can be sure we'll have to pay. It comes down to trust:Do you think BT are better placed to upgrade the network or do you think the government could do it better?

      (*)Note on usage patterns:If you run your connection flat out 24/7 you could be more of a PITA to your ISP than I am to mine. I have a 14Mb/s connection down in South Northants but my usage rarely goes higher than 3GB a month. I also mostly browse the web so am more 'contention friendly' than someone streaming video or downloading large files.

    2. Greg J Preece

      Talk Talk are horrendous, mind

      See title. Never met a happy TT customer.

      1. My Alter Ego
        Devil

        There is an upside

        Every time they fuck up, cc any complaints to the company secretary, we ended up £120 in good will gestures. Still not worth the hassle though.

        I now have the name & number of a very nice lady in the chief executives office, as much as I feel I should post it for all to see, it's probably a little harsh on her.

    3. jubtastic1
      Holmes

      Re: This amuses/depresses me

      "My provider (Talk Talk) fails"

      QFT

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      Re: This amuses/depresses me

      It's a 'up to' service, not a 8mbps service.

      On Talktalk with 37.8meg fibre line, read it and weep.

  5. Red Bren
    Meh

    Lack of granularity

    These statistics are aggregated over too wide an area to be of much use, especially for choosing somewhere to live. It's no comfort to be told the average speed for your local authority area is an order of magnitude higher than you can get.

    What I want to know is the average speed at street level and whether I have a genuine choice of connection providers. 10 different rebrands of Openreach ADSL is not real competition.

    1. StooMonster
      Thumb Down

      Totally agree

      Look at Kent for example.

      The towns have 100Mb cable modem and fibre optic available -- some of them are often mentioned in El Reg as test-beds for Virgin Media services -- but the surrounding countryside can have terrible broadband coverage and you might even be lucky to get dizzy heights of 1Mb.

      I imagine its the same over most of the country, so aggregating results into counties give more a picture of "is county rural" or "is county urban" than anything useful.

  6. graeme leggett Silver badge

    Size of data sets make data less useful

    Given that the data is by "administrative authority" you get numbers that cover, in my area of interest , about 2000 square miles and are therefore abot as much use as the proverbial.

  7. AndrueC Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Interesting data

    It probably shows a nice combination of population density and variation in regional contributions to GDP.

    If you're in 1, 2 or 3 then you either live in each other's pockets or you're a big contributor to the UK economy.

    If you live in 4 or 5 then at least you can enjoy fresh air :)

    1. honkhonk34
      Meh

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      I think it said these statistics were based on Openreach and Virgin, which would be primarily residential connections I'd assume, won't big business be on leased lines and stuff?

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        True..

        ..but the employees have to live somewhere and it's usually fairly close to the business. Therefore the more successful a region is economically the more people are likely to live within it. I would definitely expect a rough correlation between population size and wealth generation. The other factor that would be more interesting to know would be 'difficulty of service provision' but I don't imagine that's ever going to be made public.

        Ultimately I suppose there's really only two factors that impact the service availability:

        * The cost of provision.

        * The ability to pay.

        Like most things in life really. If you're wealthy you can have anything, if you're poor the options are more restricted.

    2. Da Weezil

      Fallacy.....

      "If you live in 4 or 5 then at least you can enjoy fresh air :)"

      Hmm not so much fresh air here in zone 5 (and mentioned in the list of worst speeds) with a cluster of gas terminals, a couple of oil refineries oh and the Power Station about to come on stream... Thats without the streams of traffic form 2 ferry terminals all fighting for space on our under resourced roads, so despite being a big "enabler" of the UK economy (no fuel = no nothing) zone 5 here is (as usual) the worst of both worlds. Poor speeds and a lot of issues from the "fuel industry" - including an explosion and several deaths only a few weeks back.

      Hardly a rural idyll

  8. Justicesays
    FAIL

    Hmm, "Sync Speed"

    So, the fact that massive contention ratios and overselling vs the backend pipe sizes are pretty important as well, we'll just look at the phone line quality, not what speed people are actually getting in practice.

    Maybe oftcom should have contacted speedtest.net or similar...

    My line may have synced at 8 Mb/s when I was with BT, but their laughable "21st Century network" was unable to deliver more than 2-3Mb/s, and that was before it faulted and kept dropping to a tenth of that, with the support staff unable to help resolve the issue.

    Needless to say, jumped ship to a LLU provider, much better, speeds actually close to sync speed.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Good point

      They are both relevant but I agree that Ofcom don't pay enough attention to contention ratios. It's silly because most ISPs don't actually have any control over the sync speed. Well - they can perhaps choose to limit it but in terms of the maximum possible they are stuck. They can only offer what BT an the laws of physics allow.

      It's a problem because of Ofcom's love affair with the free market. Competition has indeed kept prices down but it does nothing for the technology. The only thing an ISP can control in most cases is contention. Worse still the market place (us, the consumers) have been programmed to expect cheap-as-chips connectivity. There's bugger all profit in being an ISP these days.

      You only have to look at Be. One of the few ISPs to have almost no congestion - speeds are constant for most customers 24/7. But there's a price premium and clearly money talks. Be never was a very big ISP. People would rather pay £10pcm and whine about evening speeds than pay £22pcm and get the top speed their line can provide regardless of time of day and without usage limits.

  9. Noel Morgan
    Unhappy

    N.Ireland

    I notice on the full set of figures that if you sort on highest percentage of people with <2Mb speeds, 16 out of 18 are in N. Ireland.

    I also understand that a lot of the figures are nonsense.

    I get 4.5mb

    My NEXT DOOR neighbour gets 2mb

    the neighbour on the other side gets 0.5mb

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re your neighbours

      Gross differences like that are most likely due to internal wiring faults. Tell them to have a read here:

      http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm

      1. Noel Morgan

        N. Ireland

        Thanks - but already done that for them.

        According to any of the speedchecker websites we should ALL be getting only 0.5Mb.

        I am just lucky I guess - but it is a rural area and we will never be getting any further upgrades.

  10. Nigel Whitfield.

    Not much use

    As I've blogged over on GoneDigital.net, I think this map is pretty useless.

    One figure for the Highlands? Even though around a quarter of the inhabitants are in Inverness, which must surely skew the results somewhat.

    Down in the south, you can break out Portsmouth and Southampton, but if you want to know how broadband fares in Winchester or Basingstoke, you have to make do with figures that include all the rural areas of the county instead - similarly over in Cambridgeshire.

    Not breaking London down is daft too.

    Not only does it not serve punters well, as they can't really tell if they'll get Edinburgh's "fastest" broadband in the New Town or at Turnhouse, it also doesn't serve much of a public policy purpose, as without more detailed breakdowns, you can't see if investment is evenly spread, or if it needs to be beefed up in certain areas. Will high tech industries be able to revitalise old industrial or mining areas for instance, or is the broadband there too rubbish? This tells us nothing about that.

    It does, however, make it look like someone at Ofcom's been doing something. Which is a nice tick in the productivity box.

  11. Alfie
    Unhappy

    Granularity

    Although if I'd had access to this data I might not have been so quick to move from East Dunbartonshire to North Lanarkshire three years ago. Went from a solid 5Mb to a 1.2Mb connection. Might have something to do with being several km from the exchange, but you would expect better in Scotland's industrial heartland/wasteland.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Load of cobblers

    I checked my area on the map, and nearly choked - the "average" ADSL speed given for this part of the country, was nearly four times the fastest we've ever wrung out of the length of wet string, which I'm convinced BT laid in our street in lieu of a 21st-century phone line.

    We live on a new estate, just outside a large, supposedly "high-tech" town, with a new BT Infinity-enabled exchange a few minutes' drive away. Despite all this, with a following wind we're lucky to nudge 2Mbps on our ADSL connection. I'd pay for BT Infinity if we could get it, but BT says they have no idea when we'll ever have a suitable link to our home.

    I don't think this map was intended as a joke, but that's how it looks from here.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Boffin

      Your milleage may vary

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Devil

        See that dot in the far distance?

        It's the point you missed.

        Look, smarty-pants: I know perfectly well what "average" means. I would've thought that the yawning gap between the average speed for our area (8Mbps), and what we get (2Mbps), would've made my point on its own (especially as the area in question is one of the smaller ones on the map), but obviously not. (Had it occurred to you that if 8Mbps is the average, some users would be getting more than that, and perhaps that's part of what's got me worked up?)

        And BTW, it's not a fault on our line - I've checked numerous LLU-based ISPs, and all of them say they can't give us more than 2Mbps, as the line in our street isn't up to it. Remember: we live on a new estate less than a decade old, in a suburban location - even worse, I know people a few streets away, whose phone line gives them 20Mbps+. Go figure.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      a few minutes' drive away

      And there in lies your problem. if you'd opted for a house a few minutes walk away you would not be complaining. ADSL Technology works well upto 2km much beyond 4km and your going to have to sacrifice more chickens and continue praying for some god of 'magic' to change the laws of physics.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Sadly...

        ...ADSL speed was not the highest priority on my family's shopping list, when it came to choosing our house :-) (Just as well - the max speed was 512Kbps-ish when we moved in...)

  13. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Cornwall a 4?

    Cornwall only a 4?! So what happened to all that ActNow money that was "used" to put Cornwall at the front of the broadband leader board

  14. David Webb
    Angel

    2012

    Be interesting to see where Cornwall (4) comes in 2012, by then the majority of exchanges should be FTTx so the average available speed should push them into 1st place (with fresh air) and by 2014 100% will be FTTx, so Cornwall, best place to live, best place for interwebs access

  15. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    I'll show my arse in debenhams window if.......

    BT get all of Cornwall with at least fttc by 2014

  16. Mystic Megabyte
    Linux

    Island life

    I have to catch two different ferries just to get to the Scottish mainland. I live about a mile from the local exchange. My router reports a 8128 Kb/s connection and for large files I normally get a steady 3.6Mb/s download speed. Heavy rain can meddle with the microwaves. Sorry, must dash and feed the seals :)

  17. 21st Century Peon
    WTF?

    Fermanagh, the slowest-piped region in the country, has 95% "superfast availability"

    ...but nearly a third of its households have connections slower than 2Mb/s.

    Cookstown has 98% "superfast availability", but the second-slowest average speed in the country, with slow connections to over one-third of homes.

    In fact, Northern Ireland in general has very low speeds, with high-speed available to pretty much anyone who asks for it.

    Clearly, either due to expense or disinterest, no-one's signing up for superfast connections round that way.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    report on the state of the UK's digital communications infrastructure.

    Ok so I see download but I am left to presume upload is not considered communication...

  19. Fat Jez
    FAIL

    results skewed slightly by Virgin's "high" speeds?

    Bristol second? Where I live, any of those areas marked as the worst would be an improvement for me. However, a few streets away where Virgin have cable, I could be ticking along with 50Mbps. That's going to skew the average for my area just a bit when for those of us on ADSL, 4Mbps is something we aspire to.

  20. Baggypants
    Headmaster

    Speed Bands

    Interesting that scores of 2 to 4 are for an average sync speed of 6 to 16Mb/s. A bandwidth of 10Mb/s over 3 points. Providers advertise up to 24Mb/s which is a bandwidth of 8Mb/s in which they can attain a score of 1. Now, note the number of authorities with an average sync speed score of 1.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What does 'average' mean?

    I suspect they mean - erm - 'mean' with a few superfast connections dragging the mean upwards. I'd like to know what the median connection speeds are.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Selective Grouping?

    Hartlepool gets an entry all to itself (7.9) but then the whole of Gloucestershire is grouped together (6.6) - presumably to hide some of the totally crap connection speeds in Cheltenham (<1mb) and other parts of the county.

  23. Zilla

    Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink....

    Is how I feel living on the Isle of Dogs, surrounded by Datacentres and buckets of connectivity.... yet I can only manage a meager 5mbit.

    If I had the money I could pay for some roof space at any of these DC's and get myself a nice 100mbit+ wireless LOS link. Unfortunately that would probably cost me over £5k a month.

  24. DomS
    Meh

    London

    London? 8.8Mbps. Ha! Where I live firmly in zone 2 so hardly out of the sticks I have no Infinity (despite the exchange being enabled), no Virgin Media, and the best BT could give me was 3.5Mbps. I'm switching to O2 who reckon they can give me 7Mbps over the same phone line through which BT could only provide 3.5. I'll believe it when it happens..

    1. Tim Walker

      BT Infinity

      Same here - our "Infinity-enabled" exchange is less than a mile up the road, yet we can't get it in our neck of the woods (we're stuck at 2Mbps).

      What's the point of getting the exchanges "Infinitied", if they don't then finish the job? It's like me leaving the washing-up half-done...

  25. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Bristol

    What's going on with the extension of Bristol's coverage out into the Bristol Channel?

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Average sync speed.....

    is a fairly useless measure. I used to sync at 5.5Mbps when I was with BT, but rarely got anything like that in actual throughput. Most evenings I was down to 500kbps, or there abouts. Still "synced" at 5.5Mbps, but couldn't use more than 1/10th of that.

    I switched to Wight Cable, (mentioned in the article) who operate a WiMax service. Most of the time I do, now, get a genuine 8Mbps end-to-end service. Not "superfast" by any means, but perfectly suitable for most uses, and a world away from BT's near dial-up early evening crawl.

  27. Bob Dunlop
    Thumb Down

    Government statistics

    Just shows you can't trust them.

    Sub 4M here and falling on the BT wholesale monopoly. I can remember when it was 6.5 but as it slows and it falls below the fault threshold, BT look at it and regrade the line with a lower threshold.

    Deepest darkest Hampshire.

    Down the pub it was suggested the quickest way to get an upgrade would be to burn down the exchange.

  28. IR

    Colours

    Those are some random colours on that graph. Why not red-orange-yellow-green-blue in order? Instead we get some awful pastel shades that aren't in any particular order at all.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    TalkTalk...

    They're fucking awful. I base this on the fact that I use them and have had connection problems since early December.

    Sadly, for me, I don't think they give a fuck.

  30. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

    I've got your title right here

    Nice to see Bristol doing so well. Looking at OFCON's map though, I'm glad that I don't live in the part of Bristol which is apprently in the middle of the Severn Estuary.

  31. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
    Boffin

    A quick way to improve ADSL speed for most people.

    Since most people's BT master socket will be in an inconvenient spot, they will be have an extension between this, and their modem. This is usually cheap unshielded wire and this is where your signal gets attenuated.

    The solution? Buy a length of CAT5 cable and splicing tool from your friendly local online retailer for a small amount (typically a few pounds), rip out your extension cable and splice this into the master socket instead. Don't worry about using all the strands, you'll only need to connect four IIRC, just make sure you note the order of splicing at both ends (the strands int he cable are helpfully colour coded to do this). Because CAT5 cable is shielded, your speed will usually improve by a double figure percentage. When I did this a few years ago, my ADSL speed went from about 3Mb/s to around 5. Milage may vary...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Don't you mean twisted pair ?

      Or am I getting too old ?

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Title, eh? Must I?

    I think it's about time we British gave up this pipe dream of having super-fast Internet.

    There's more chance of an asteroid colliding with Earth and killing everyone than us getting speeds of 100 Mbps or Fiber Optics.

  33. Chris Martin 2
    Alert

    Really?

    Cheltenham and Gloucester seem to be in the 3 zone although we are in a Virgin Media Area. I have no problems with their 30Mb Service. And of course faster speeds are available. So wondering why the South West scored so badly.

  34. xyz Silver badge
    Mushroom

    where the hell has Shetland gone?

    I'm getting fed up with all these maps of the UK that miss of Shetland. Ok the BBC weather map makes Scotland so small it's impossible to see anything, but Shetland is still there just. Sky miss it off, Channel 5 miss it of. Don't you English know there is another set of islands above Orkney?

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Basingstoke...

    Smack bang in north Hampshire, about 40 minutes away from f'ing *London*, i.e. the definition of the f'ing commuter belt to the capitol city. 1Mpbs / second ... max ... on a good day. In an estate built around 10 years or so ago. Watching f'ing YouTube at a decent definition seems like sci-fi to me.

    Maybe I should move to one of the "worst" locations. AC due to the shame.

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