UK broadband services getting faster and more reliable

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BT has come top of a nationwide performance study of broadband providers, for the second quarter in a row.

The Internet Performance Indicator (IPI) report from ISP benchmarking specialist Epitiro, revealed in its third quarter 2006 study published today that BT, Pipex, Demon, Plusnet and Virgin.net provided the UK's top five mainstream ADSL broadband services in the third quarter of 2006, in terms of overall technical performance.

This compares with the previous quarter when the top five consisted of BT, Virgin.net, Demon, AOL UK and Orange (formerly Wanadoo). During the last quarter, Orange began offering free and heavily discounted broadband services to its mobile phone subscribers, which is likely to have accounted for it slipping out of the top five.

On average the sample ISPs were tested 58,313 times from eleven locations around the UK from 1st July to 30th September 2006.

"Our ADSL testing found that in terms of technical performance, BT topped the overall rankings for the period July to September 2006" said Gavin Johns, Managing Director of Epitiro.

The study also found that the national upgrades to ADSL Max are providing faster total speeds than the previous 2 Mbps IPStream and Datastream ADSL services. The average connection speed for the period 1st July to 30th September was 3817.82 kbps.

"The nationwide upgrades to ADSL Max are providing faster total connection speeds than the previous standard of 2 Mbps. However customers should be aware that when they are buying an "up to 8 meg" service, this is exactly what it means. The speed of broadband service reduces the further the customer's connection is from their local telephone exchange, so customers should not expect to get a consistent 8 Mbps speed from their ADSL Max connection" said Johns.

The third quarter study revealed that Plusnet achieved the highest overall connection speed. Tesco had the lowest number of connection failures in Q3, suggesting that their consumer customers had the highest degree of uptime of the sample group. BT performed best in regards to the speeds users experienced when uploading and downloading data to consumer-grade web space.

BT also topped the ranking in terms of HTTP download speed. In the main, faster HTTP download speeds deliver better general browsing of web sites.

Demon had the lowest packet loss.

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