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Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

We'd hear howls of disbelief from the countryside but nobody supports dialup now

The average home broadband speed in the UK increased to 28.9Mbps, up by 6Mbps from a year ago – according to the latest annual research from Ofcom.

In November 2015, forty-two per cent of residential fixed broadband lines were superfast products – connections with a headline speed of "up to" 30Mbps or more, a nine percentage points increase on last year.

The proportion of lines with a headline speed of “up to” 10Mbps or higher increased by two percentage points to 93 per cent over this period.

Not surprisingly, average download speeds in urban areas were more than three times those in rural areas, which were 13Mbps. The main reasons for this difference were the lower availability of fibre and cable broadband in rural areas and slower average ADSL and fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connection speeds.

Virgin Media's 100Mbps and 200Mbps services provided the fastest average actual download speeds of all the ISP packages included in the report. Its “up to” 200Mbps service recorded the highest average actual download speed at 174Mbps.

In a gloating statement, the company said: “Unlucky for our rivals but lucky for our customers, for the 13th consecutive time Virgin Media is named by Ofcom as the fastest broadband network. While our rivals’ speeds are slipping backwards, Virgin Media’s investment in better broadband is pushing UK connectivity forwards.”

The research was compiled from a residential panel of over 2,000 volunteers who have connected a hardware measurement unit to their broadband router. ®

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