Virgin Media is the fastest broadband service in Britain -- that's according to figures from Netflix, which ranks the UK third from bottom in its league table of broadband speeds.
The Netflix ISP speed index lists highest, lowest and average Internet speeds for the US, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Mexico.
The UK has a maximum speed of 2.37Mbps on Virgin. The lowest is a disappointing 1.77Mbps on Everything Everywhere. Everything Everywhere, formed by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile and now officially known as EE, is the only UK ISP to actually get slower in the past six months.
In between top and bottom, BT manages an average of 2.25Mbps, O2 offers 2.23Mbps and BSkyB hits 2.10Mbps. All of which gives us an average of just 2.07Mbps, beating only Ireland and Mexico.
Sky last week bought O2 and Be Broadband, and will switch customers over. Not great news after Sky's recent problems with too many people using its network.
The fastest speed is enjoyed by the US, courtesy of Google Fiber, the experimental Google-funded fibre-optic network in Kansas City. Residents enjoy 3.35Mbps, contributing to an average of 2.30Mbps.
The next highest is Sweden, with 2.99Mbps. The country with the best lowest speed is Finland, with 2.28Mbps -- making it the overall best performer on average.
The worst performer is Mexico, with an average speed of 1.65Mbps.
Netflix gathers these real-world speeds from streaming movies and TV shows to customers in these countries. If they seem a little low, it's "due to many factors including the variety of encodes we use to deliver the TV shows and movies we carry as well as home Wi-Fi and the variety of devices our members use."
How's your speed? What do you think of your ISP? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
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Comments 15
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Patrick Cantellow 11 March, 2013 18:17
You do get what you pay for but they said we have been doubled when we haven't, there's so much to it, Trading Standers are looking at it
Howard10000 11 March, 2013 18:31
Laughable.
I have Virgin Fibre Optic 60MBPS - according to them.
Strangely and despite multiple complaints, when I measure it I get less than 1MBPS.
Absolute shambles.
Only
davefromwales 11 March, 2013 18:59
im on BT, one of their infinity 2 packages I think.
I get 70meg down and 20 up at the router, however I use powerline and a switch, so end up with about 58meg down and 17meg up.
As for my phone coverage? EE gives 3G (orange) and vodacrap cant even get above edge lol.
this all pales in comparison to the speeds I had on my laptop at a BB Developer event in Amsterdam last month, had 686meg down!!!! that's insane
anonymous 11 March, 2013 19:42
Speedtest.net shows us having about 95Mb/s on our 100Mb line most of the time. Virgin dont I think do anything less than 30MB (on cable at least), so how do they get 2.37? Does not explain it very well in the article.
Daedlaus
DavidO 11 March, 2013 20:03
@ anonymous 11 March, 2013 19:42 - two words, "Traffic Shaping" I'm on virgin and run speedtest at 30-45MBPS, then in iplayer I am lucky to get to or 3 MDPS raw download speed is pretty meaningless, you need to check on an application level.
anonymous 11 March, 2013 20:12
I assume this refers to the actual download rate, and not the speed of the connection. You can calculate the download rate by dividing the connection speed by 8 - so from a 50Mbps connection, you could achieve a max throughput of 6.25MB/s
Think they have got their units a bit mixed up. Mbps = mega bits per second, MB/s = mega BYTES per second. There are 8 bits in a byte. So the speeds above should be 'MB/s' not 'Mbps'.
anonymous 11 March, 2013 22:14
Come on. What a rubbish article. Nothing explained.
This is not about the speed u r getting in your house. Its about netflix streams.
I have got a basic connection from BT , i always get 15 mbps, good enough to do flawless video chat, downloads, streaming and every thing.
anonymous 11 March, 2013 23:59
What a pointless article. Rich Trenholm you should be ashamed. Yeah yeah maybe UK doesn't have very fast internet, maybe they do, but these figures are based on 7 countries only? So UK is also 4th from the top? What if the average BT subscriber doesn't give a toss about superfast connection? Don't waste our time
anonymous 12 March, 2013 07:04
Rich Trenholm, I hope you didn't get paid for this meaningless rubbish
Late8 12 March, 2013 08:41
Only trouble is - its not true!
Virgin love to cram as many people on the network in a area as possible. Student areas and City center living is the worse for it.
anonymous 12 March, 2013 12:02
My average download speed is 62Mbps on Virgin 60Mbps service. (I am part of a trial which is monitoring speeds, packet loss etc.). Upload is around 2.9Mbps.
I've been with Virgin/Ntl for years and have always had great service.
anonymous 12 March, 2013 12:42
its mix bag with virgin, virgin used to be great and in some areas they still are but its not same throughout, im on 30MB but at peak im lucky to get about 3MB, i made lots of complaints but always get the same answer, there's a problem in your area with over crowding" you'd thing they would have sorted this issue out but its been over 3 months, its a joke,
James Victor 12 March, 2013 13:07
I have a 120Mbps Virgin connection and log a regular download speed with speedtest.net @ 124-126Mbps... Through a "wireless" router running the new "801.11ac" protocol.
Trouble is a lot of people dont understand that although your ISP is pushing a certain speed to you this does not mean your equipment at home can 'use' that speed. (I for one fell victim to this myself hence the new router!)
Virgin have always been good to me, and I rate them higher than other ISP's I have used.
anonymous 12 March, 2013 16:32
Its pretty misleading to say 3rd from bottom when there are only 8 countries! You could have said 5th or 'in the middle' and it would have been about as meaningful!
Ralph Hardwick 12 March, 2013 20:26
I have had VM fibre connections for years in multiple addresses and never got less than about 80% advertised speeds.The most annoying thing is that the connection sometimes drops for a few seconds and then comes back.