You shouldn't be surprised that UK broadband speeds suck

The UK ranks 31st in the world for broadband speeds and lags behind most of Europe, according to a new study. Cable ranked the UK's average broadband speed at 16.51Mbps (megabits per second), which means a Lord of the Rings length movie would take one hour and two minutes to download.
A total of 19 European countries, 17 of which are in the EU, have better speeds than the UK. But we still come ahead of 158 other countries including Italy, France, Ireland and Monaco. Singapore tops the table with an average speed of 55.13Mbps. Yemen has the slowest broadband speed in the world, at an average of just 0.34Mbps, meaning it would take two days to download the same HD movie that would take just over 18 minutes in Singapore.


But why is the UK faring so poorly against other countries?

Andrew Ferguson, editor of thinkbroadband, says we shouldn’t be surprised – and that slow speeds are partly our own fault. There are millions of people in the UK, he explains, who could upgrade to faster services... but haven't.While he admits more money needs to be spent to get better technology to a minority, 93 per cent of people in the UK have the option of selecting super-fast broadband and simply haven’t brought it. This discourages providers from rolling out the faster connections, says Ferguson. “Providers will put better options out there to test whether they will work. If they aren’t being bought, they think ‘why are we bothering, we might as well just offer the cheap option everyone is buying’,” he says.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Asus Customer Service 0800-046-5242 | Help & Service

The murky world of Facebook raffles