Ofcom: UK broadband speeds on the rise

Average download speeds increased by a quarter last year, according to new Ofcom research into the UK’s broadband speeds.

Ofcom’s UK Home Broadband Performance research looks into the actual broadband speeds achieved by a sample of households across the UK during November 2020. The research, published as an interactive guide, includes data on download and upload speeds, performance by connection type and comparisons between urban and rural broadband speeds.

The latest figures show:

• Broadband speeds continue to improve: the average (mean) download speed of UK residential fixed broadband services was 80.2 Mbit/s - an increase of 25% from 2019 when the average download speed was 64 Mbit/s. This was helped by the growing availability and take-up of faster broadband packages.
• Upload speeds increase by more than half: average (mean) upload speeds increased by 54% to 21.6 Mbit/s, as more households upgraded to faster services, including full fibre connections with very high upload speeds. Higher upload speeds can help improve people’s experience of video calls, gaming and sending large files when working from home.
• Rural households still get slower broadband, but the gap is narrowing: while average speeds in rural areas remain lower than in towns and cities, more than half (60%) of rural households could get superfast speeds of over 30Mbit/s during peak hours of the day, compared to almost three quarters (74%) of urban households.

We will be publishing a full report into home broadband performance in the autumn, including more detailed analysis and updates of the datasets published today.