Average Broadband Download [NEW] Speed
Merel Cofran
Compare typical online activities with the minimum download speed (Megabits per second, or Mbps) needed for adequate performance for each application. Additional speed may enhance performance. Speeds are based on running one activity at a time.
For household broadband needs, use our Household Broadband Guide to compare minimum Mbps needs for light, moderate and high household use with one, two, three or four devices at a time (such as a laptop, tablet or game console).
In the world of broadband, megabits are abstract. Though most of us understand the more the megabits the faster the broadband, few of us comprehend how that applies to our household. Is 10Mbps enough? What about 50? Or 500?
What many people struggle with is how to apply average broadband speeds to the needs of their household, so they can choose a broadband deal with an internet speed that is right for their requirements.
However, due to the low price and widespread availability of fibre, ASDL is now generally only offered to customers when there is no fibre connection available. ADSL is typically slower and less reliable than fibre broadband as it uses pre-existing BT copper phone lines to send and receive data, with a typical speed of around 10Mbps.
Some fibre optic deals now offer speeds of up to 900 or 1000Mbps. Virgin Media offers full fibre on its own fibre network, and Openreach is steadily upgrading its network across the UK. This means you can now get full fibre from BT in certain areas, as well as providers like Sky, EE, TalkTalk and Vodafone who share the same network.
As a general rule, you should add an extra 30Mbps of broadband provision for each person in your household that downloads games to a console, PC, or tablet, or who streams TV shows in 4K, or make sure that your broadband deal includes an average speed of at least 100Mbps to cover all bases.
Average download speeds for broadband can be affected by a number of factors. These include how far your home is from the nearest cabinet and telephone exchange, whether your standard broadband is operating along old or damaged copper wires, and what types of broadband are available in your area.
Generally a good internet or broadband speed is around 11Mbps for standard broadband. A faster broadband speed would be between 11Mbps and 50Mbps. A very fast broadband speed would be 100Mbps or higher.
Yes. As a result of the increasing availability of ultrafast services across the UK, the average broadband speed is now around 80Mbps. However, many people can still not get access to these high speed connections so if you can get 100Mbps or more, you are one of the lucky ones.
In 2013 the United States had an average download speed of 31 Mbps and was ranked 25th globally in average broadband Internet speed. Over the last ten years, the USA has made strides in Internet service.
We are bridging the digital divide in our state by bringing communities 100% fiber-to-the-home Internet that offers speed and reliability, local and honest customer service, and lifetime pricing without contracts or extra fees.
This is a list of countries by Internet connection speed for average and median data transfer rates for Internet access by end-users.The difference between average and median speeds is the way individual measurements are aggregated. Average speeds are more commonly used but can give a wrong impression of the actual user experience since fast connections can bias the average results. Median results represent the point where half the population has faster and the other half of the population has slower data transfer rates.
This is a sortable list of broadband internet connection speed by country, ranked by Speedtest.net data for April 2021,[1] and with M-Lab data for May 2020[2] and SpeedTestNet.io data for March 2021, and BandwidthPlace.com data for April 2022.[3], and Speed Test Pros data for February 2023.[4]
We record hundreds of thousands of test results every month. Broadband provider is detected by IP address rather than self selection. Mobile broadband providers and those that only serve business customers are not counted towards the national average figure.
Ofcom have also published average broadband speeds recorded across the UK, including individual figures for the largest providers, different types of broadband and different types of neighbourhood. These are recorded by a different method involving equipment installed in the home to record speeds during day-to-day usage. Figures are reported twice a year. The last available report gave the UK's national average broadband speed as 28.9Mb in November 2015.
Make sure that nothing intensive is running on your computer. If your virus checker is in the middle of a scan or you're busy copying files or converting a video, this is likely to slow down your computer and so affect how accurately the speed test can run. If possible close all other apps, browser windows and tabs and try to run the speed test alone. This is especially important if you have a slow computer or you're running the test on a tablet or mobile phone and tend to wait a long time for apps to load.
If possible, avoid using proxies, VPNs, and 'Turbo' features, some browsers or broadband providers offer features designed to speed up your connection by processing the data that goes through your connection before you receive it. This can artificially increase your test speed or even prevent the test from completing. Our test uses the HTTP protocol over TCP port 80, if you're having trouble with the test make sure that this traffic isn't handled by a proxy or blocked by a firewall. Some Internet connected audio-video equipment or services designed to allow access to video content in other countries can also have an affect on our test results.
We recommend running the test more than once to make sure there wasn't some sort of blip during your first test. We'd also recommend using another speed test such as this Broadband Speed Test to compare your results, and testing at several different times of the day and night to see how peaktime network congestion affects your service.
Unlike many speed test providers, our test doesn't require Flash and will instead run on any recent web browser with JavaScript, including tablets such as the iPad, Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus or Kindle Fire. You can even test your speed on a mobile phone without installing any apps! We've tested on a range of smartphones include iPhones, Android phones like Samsung Galaxy S4, Moto G and HTC One, and recent Windows Phone devices like the Nokia Lumia 630.
The test sends a small amount of data to your browser to get a rough idea of how fast your connection is and to measure latency (how quickly transfers begin), based on this figure it then sends a large amount of data and measures how quickly this is transferred. The data transferred is randomised and designed to not benefit from compression and to avoid caching, however it can be affected by proxies and 'turbo' browser features so ensure that these are switched off before you test. We send enough data to saturate your connection ensuring that even the fastest lines are accurately tested. The test is run multiple times and these figures are averaged to get the best indication of your connection's speed. For the upload portion of the test, a similar process occurs but random data is sent back to our servers.
Your test results are stored on our servers to allow us to report on the average speeds of each of the providers. This helps other visitors to our site to decide which is the best broadband provider for their needs, as do any ratings you leave for your provider.
Rating your provider or entering your postcode are optional, the test will work without these. However if we have your postcode then we're able to show you the estimated speeds for your line and which technologies are available in your area. This allows you to better understand your speed in context and determine whether you have a fault, or if you're just experiencing the speeds expected in your area.
Broadband speed is generally measured in megabits per second. This is written as 'Mbps' or just 'Mb', sometimes this is also referred to as 'meg' or 'megs'. A 'bit' is a single binary digit of data. There are 1,000,000 bits in a megabit.
File transfer speed, as reported during a download, is likely to be measured in megabytes per second rather than megabits per second, which means this is more than 8 times slower than you might expect if you thought megabits and megabytes were equivalent.
In reality a 38Mb fibre broadband connection can only download a file at 4.7MB/s. However for most webpages that's immediate loading, and for the average music album download, that's approximately one track per second. You'd also be able to download the average standard definition movie in just 3.5 minutes or in 15 minutes for a HD film. Obviously on a 76Mb connection these times are roughly halved (or a little over).
We often get asked why broadband speed checkers sometimes report download speeds slower than the maximum theoretically possible at a property. We've compiled a list of some of the causes of slow broadband connections.
If you stream videos, TV shows and films over your connection then download speeds of 5Mb or over should allow high definition content without buffering. However if you live in a home with more than one Internet user, perhaps other family members or housemates, then you can quickly discover that you need several times that at times when everyone's using your connection, especially if more than one of you wants to stream video.
If you're already on cable or fibre and on a slower package, this speed reduction is likely to be artificially enforced. Switching to a package with a higher speed limit will likely see a significant increase in your speeds. On Virgin Media cable services this is likely to always be the case, as their lines are rated to be able to achieve the maximum speeds.
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