UK placed 27th out of 54 countries in broadband speeds

[TeePee]

I'm from the US, in a major metropolitan area, and I find their claim that the *average* download speed is 107 Mbps... rather dubious. That may be the speeds ISPs *claim* for any given area, but I'll be damned if anyone ever gets that. I don't know how many times I've either sought or been advertised for higher bandwidth, only to be told "well, yes in your area, but not in your house."

Yeah, 100Mbps is rare in the US, and certainly not for the price mentioned. In Seattle, 54GBP will buy you 'Up to' 60Mbps from Comcast, which likely equates to a realistic 20Mbps before it's throttled. Better than it used to be, but not deserving of a place on the top ten.

[Salazaar]

I'm on Virgin and getting in the region of 100Mbps, probably not quite that most days but more than enough for everything I do.

I wouldn't go back to any of the other providers in my area though as they all run through BT infrastructure which is just broken here. In the sense that there's a physical fault somewhere on the copper line serving my house which Openreach never successfuly repaired - I could get ~30Mbps on a good day but the connection would frequently drop out/slow to 1-2Mbps.

[Ozaron]

Heard more than a few bad things about Virgin's service, especially for real world reliability (packet loss, oversubscription, crippled upload bandwidth, inconsistent training & ethics of engineers) over the years.

I'd still try them if they even served our area with their own network.

[Smudger]

I'm on Virgin and always get at least the headline rate (200mbps currently), and don't have any contention issues, which is surprising, as there's no other fibre, so if you want 'fast', it has to be Virgin. The only issue we've had is last week, when the network team came to fix an issue with noise on the line, unplugged those who were showing as being affected, then forgot who went where, and just left it, with the attitude 'they'll ring up when they notice'. The poor guy from the home install team had 4 more to do after us at 4pm, and had to go through a whole long process of box-ticking, when he knew exactly what the issue was. funny thing is, our service wasn't deteriorated, we were still getting headline rates and low pings, but they still came and replaced the cable between street and house. Result? Same.

[aniilv]

Avg. Monthly Cost £30

Haha, so untrue. Well, maybe on talk talk, but then the 55mbps turns to 5mbps

[Telekloud]

wtf is the chart cropped, just show the uncropped? feels a bit click-batty

You mean because it doesn't show every single country on the planet? Good point, it is a bit click-batty.

[gagaga]

re Virgin ... I solidly get 380mbps with only occasional slowdowns. I'm running a chinese box with a kaby lake i7, 8gb RAM, SSD, Intel LANs and Sophos UTM as the firewall as the main limiter previously was the quad core atom box I had .

Re their speed - the 20meg upload cap is apparently structural .. when much of the network was built out it included hard filters in place as the low frequencies used for upload were never considered to need to carry more than signaling from the box to the control centre so they filtered it to keep the signal clean/reduce interference. Trouble is they need to remove those filters to get more bandwidth up and they have no record of where they actually are in the network. I suspect at somepoint they'll try to offer more than 20mbps but it'll still be advertised as 20 with more being pot-luck as to whether you're on a clean part of the network.

For those with Virgin issues - it's the v3 box (and the v2 before) that are crap. I run mine as just a modem now (not even a router let alone wifi) and it seems to behave, but from what I read it's leaving the box in bells and whistles mode that causes the grief.

[Pleiades]

As ever the devil is in the detail...


Hungary - we paid for their infrastructure so it's much, much newer than ours

Sorry, who paid for their infrastructure? Who's "we"?

[yeeeeman]

They forgot a few countries. In Romania we have 1gbps for 15 euro per month.I think this easily puts us on 1st place.

[persimmon]

A lot Germania's infrastructure was fully renewed in the late 40's and again in the late 80's.
Romania went from tin-cans on string to brand new cables with EU help ...

[watercooled]

They forgot a few countries. In Romania we have 1gbps for 15 euro per month.I think this easily puts us on 1st place.

A package being available does not mean every single resident is subscribed to it, paying that price and/or reliably attaining that bitrate.

Having said that it's an obviously flawed comparison so it's academic at best. It's also a bit silly for it to compare prices across countries with vastly different economies. What is possible in one country for a given price could very well be effectively impossible in another due to different material, labour, utility costs, etc.