Brit Broadband Falls Short of its Billing

A study released by Pando Networks indicates disparities between the theoretical and real-world download speeds for British broadband users. By tracking the end-user speeds for more than 400,000 users for the first six months of 2011, Pando's study indicates a U.K. broadband experience that is far slower than many broadband providers advertise.Across Britain, the average download speed was 481 kbps. Download speeds are also geography dependent, with major metropolitan areas tending to be faster than their rural counterparts. The three fastest towns and cities were Brighton (1,010 kbps), Ware (909 kbps) and Stevenage (805 kbps), and the three slowest were Stanford On Avon (130 kbps), Loddington (151 kbps) and Swithland (169 kbps). Of the nation's capitals, Edinburgh was the fastest with an average of 653 kbps, followed by London with 570 kbps. Cardiff had 533 kbps and Belfast 494 kbps.The data also suggests that wide disparities exist between the speeds offered by Britain's most popular home broadband providers. Be Broadband proved to be the fastest, averaging downloads of 594 kbps, followed by Virgin Media's service clocking at 552 kbps. British Telecom was the slowest at 399 kbps. Other notable results for speed were Sky Broadband at 534 kbps, Entanet at 465 kbps and TalkTalk at 450 kbps.