Fastest ISPs 2014: United Kingdom

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Welcome to our new, ongoing series about the world's Fastest ISPs for 2014. This year, we'll take a look at the upload and download speeds of the Internet service providers (ISPs) in foreign countries, culminating with a look at the United States and Canada. We're not talking mobile speeds—this is all about those providers bringing a broadband pipe right up to customers' residences, whether it's fiber optic, cable modem, DSL, satellite, or wireless direct connections.

To measure Internet speed, we closely partnered once again with Ookla, the creator of Speedtest.net, the globe's most popular broadband testing service. The throughput ratings are based on tests run at Speedtest.net by millions of unique users who provided their upload and download speeds.

We then generated a PCMag Internet Speed Index rating for each ISP, which is a weighted score calculated by taking 80 percent of the ISP's download speed and 20 percent of its upload speed. Using that Speed Index number, we then rated the fastest ISPs.

Curious about your own broadband Internet speed? Test it right now!

Our first stop: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

U.K. broadband services are regulated by a government watchdog named Ofcom, which said in a 2007 report that over half the U.K. already had broadband, with an average speed of 4.6 Megabits per second (Mbps). According to our results, things have only gotten better—even though the U.K. ranks only No. 29 on Ookla's list of countries with high-speed broadband. With major players like Virgin Media, BT, and Sky providing service, the question is, who's the fastest in the British Isles?

The Fastest ISPs in the U.K.

Gimme some of that fiber! (Or should we say, fibre?) The U.K.'s fastest ISP, Hyperoptic, delivers fiber to the premises for large residential complexes, mainly in the western area of London, but has recently expanded to Bristol, Cardiff, and Reading—it's even in the former Olympic Athlete's Village in Stratford, which is now private residences. Hyperoptic's service earns a PCMag Internet speed index rating of 98.2.

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Just how good is 98.2? Hyperoptic sells connectivity up to 1 Gigabit per second (that's 1,000 Mbps) via its "Hyper-Sonic" package, at a cost of £50/month with a year-long contract. Typically users in a test like this have some overhead so the speed is far from the top tier, and that's the case here, where the tests average about 10 times less than gigabit Internet. What it probably indicates is that most Hyperoptic customers have the "Hyper-Active" package for 100 Mbps for £25/month (about $42).

But keep in mind—that Speed Index rating of 98.2 is still nearly three times faster than Hyperoptic's closest competitor—and that's not even its fastest tier of service. Better yet, that number is only possible because of Hyperoptic's astounding download speed of 98.5 Mbps and almost symmetrical upload speed of 96.8 Mbps. Few ISPs can provide uploads that so rival the download speed. Hyperoptic plans to bring its astoundingly

low-cost/high-speed service to half a million residences by 2018.

The second fastest ISP in the list has a much wider reach. Virgin Media scored a 34.0 index thanks to its very nice download speed (41.3 Mbps). It could have been much higher, but Virgin's upload speed of 4.9 Mbps—the third lowest in the top 10 here—dragged the index number way down.

Virgin as it is today formed from a number of mergers almost a decade ago that led to a company that plays in the business of TV, mobile phones, land-line phones, and of course Internet. The name came from licensing Sir Richard Branson's multinational conglomerate—Branson didn't actually found an ISP. But it owns the only national fiber-optic network in the U.K., and last month, it bought another small fiber provider, Smallworld Fibre, in the north and Scotland.

Virgin sells three tiers of service, starting at 50 Mbps downloads for £25/month, up to 152 Mbps for £37.50 a month, all with a 12-month contract (and a few pounds off for the beginning months). Owning all that fiber pays when it comes to speed. No other U.K. ISP even averaged 30 Mbps downloads.

As for the rest of the top 10 fastest ISPs in Great Britain, most of them stay close to each other on average, with a couple of exceptions in upload speed by North Somerset-based Cablecom Networking (a 20.6 Mbps upload, which was symmetrical with its 20.6 Mbps download) and a nice 10 Mbps upload from Kcom's KC broadband business.

U.K. Cities with the Fastest Broadband

There's a couple of ways to slice up municipalities when it comes to Internet speed: one is to look at the cities that have the fastest broadband speed on average; the second is to look at the fastest speeds in the major metropolitan areas with the most people. Let's do both.

If you want to find a municipality in the United Kingdom that all but guarantees citizens will have speedy Internet access, move to Lancaster, west of Leeds and north of Liverpool, on the River Lune. It earned a PCMag Internet Speed Index number of 41.3, trouncing the next fastest city in the U.K. (Mansfield with a 33.9.). Lancaster's index comes from coupling an astoundingly high average upload speed of 23.7 Mbps with a very respectable 45.7 Mbps average download.

Lancaster manages this feat by having many customers in its environs using B4RN (or Broadband for the Rural North) as their ISP—that's right, rural users getting fiber-optic service. B4RN users in Lancaster alone get an index number of 160. Other high-speed providers in the area include SystemHOST (95.9 index) and Virgin's Smallworld (47.3 index). The real trick is, the majority of providers in the area have steadily tested high speeds.

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The other cities in the top 10 for broadband are all hovering in the low 30s for index numbers, from Mansfield's 33.9 index down to 31.4 index in Epsom—yes, from which the salts get their name.

What's happening broadband-wise in the biggest U.K. cities? Going not so much by population as by the number of tests Speedtest.net gets receives, London is naturally on top. It certainly has the highest number of tests—but not even close to the highest average speed of its broadband, landing at only 20.5.

Of the major population centers, the cities with the fastest ISPs on average are Bristol (23.2) and Nottingham (23.1); the slowest index number goes to Sheffield in South Yorkshire, with a 17.7.

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What about the big cities in the other countries of the U.K.? Glasgow, Scotland did make the chart above based on the sheer number of usage tests, but with an index speed of 19.2. Cardiff, Wales has a more respectable index of 22; Belfast, Northern Ireland isn't far behind at 21.5.