The UK’s best and worst streets for broadband revealed

While some of us bemoan the fact our 5G signal “only” reaches 200Mbits/sec, spare a thought for those living in Kingsclere in Huntington after the street was found to have the worst broadband in the UK.

Using consumer speed tests collated by price comparison site uSwitch.com, the average download speed in the York street is just 0.22Mbits/sec.

At these speeds, a two-hour HD film would take more than 65 hours to download and you’d need at least 24 hours to download a 45-minute HD TV show.

This is despite the fact superfast broadband packages are available to residents in this area. In fact, superfast fibre broadband is available on seven out of the ten slowest streets, and is available to 95% of the country, despite a recent uSwitch survey finding that only six in ten of us (61%) believe we can get it in our local area.

uSwitch suggests a lack of awareness, rather than poor service, is the driving force behind many of these poor averages.

To make matters worse for Kingsclere residents, people working and living just 8.2 miles away in Elvington, York, are getting the second-fastest speeds in the country.

Average speeds here reached 135.56Mbits/sec over the past year, showing the digital divide is just as bad within individual cities as it is between north and south, and rural and urban locations.

According to the research, based on more than 122,845 real world speed tests, the UK’s fastest street award goes to Darwin Street, Livingston. Over the past year, residents in this Scottish postcode have achieved average speeds of 182.52Mbits/sec – a staggering 829 times faster than in the Kingsclere.

In Darwin Street it would take less than five minutes to download a two-hour HD film and under two minutes to download a 45-minute HD TV show.

Overall, a fifth (19%) of UK broadband users struggle with speeds of less than 10Mbits/sec, while one in ten (9%) crawl along at less than 5Mbps. That said, nearly four in ten users (38%) now get speeds of more than 30Mbps, up from less than a quarter (22%) four years ago.

UK’s slowest streets for broadband

UK’s fastest streets