Study: UK Broadband Speeds 'Far Slower' Than Advertised

A new study has found that average broadband speeds in the UK are "far slower" than those advertised by the various broadband providers. Downloadable content delivery provider Pando Networks -- which delivers games, software and video -- sampled over 400,000 broadband users for the first six months of 2011, and found that the average download speed across the whole of Britain is currently 481KBps. The study found that the city with the fastest average broadband speed is Brighton with 1,010KBps, while the slowest is Swithland with 169KBps average. In general, the company found that metropolitan areas saw faster speeds than rural towns. Of the most popular home broadband providers, Be Broadband was found to be the fastest with an average speed of 594KBps, following by Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, Entanet and TalkTalk. British Telecom was found to provide the slowest speeds, at 399KBps average. Last month, Pando Networks carried out a similar study in the U.S., reporting that it had found wide disparities between download speeds and completion rates for gaming content across various American locales. The study of 4 million gamers' game and patch downloads in the first half of 2011 unsurprisingly found rural customers slower than their urban counterparts, sometimes averaging download speeds ten times worse than those in the fastest U.S. cities.