Uswitch reveals slowest streets for broadband

PRICE COMPARISON WEB SITE Uswitch has released figures for the UK's slowest broadband, in which Halesworth in Suffolk won the wooden spoon.

Top, or rather bottom of the list is Mount Pleasant in Halesworth, which scored a miserable 0.128Mbits/s. In comparison the UK's town with the fastest broadband, Leamington Spa, has a broadband speed 147 times higher at 18.87Mbits/s.

Ernest Doku, a technology expert at Uswitch said, "While many areas of the country are already benefiting from the considerable investment into super-fast fibre optic networks, our research highlights the plight of households at the other end of the spectrum, struggling with download speeds so poor that in some cases it can hardly be considered a broadband service at all."

The results are based on more than 1.5 million speed tests that were made through the Uswitch web site between March and August this year. The worst 50 streets span from a speed of 0.128Mbits/s up to 0.454Mbits/s.

Many entries in the worst 20 streets list come from Hampshire and West Sussex, with southern counties generally performing badly. However, Derbyshire had the most entries in the list of 50 with a total of five.

An interesting finding is that the slowest speeds are not in remote and isolated parts of the UK. They are in urban areas where you would expect speeds to be higher, considering the shorter distances to the exchanges. This could just be that suburban users don't test their speed, though.

Doku added, "While broadband providers have been committed to upgrading broadband infrastructure as a priority, for some areas these improvements can't come soon enough. Being stuck in the slow lane is a frustrating situation, with many of us now considering broadband to be an essential service." µ