UK state of the Internet report: Virgin Media 'fast', BT's PlusNet last

Crowd-sourced speed data wrangler Ookla has published its Q3 State of the Internet report, which highlights how UK fixed-line and cellular providers have fared in the months July to September. The firm collected and analysed data from speed tests run by consumers across the UK to come up with its results. In terms of speed, …

[Jay 2]

Interesting. I'm with PN on the cheapy upto 40Mbps tariff (though I think I get ~32Mbps or so), seems OK to me. No real complaints and I don't think I do enough zippy network-based gaming to notice latency etc. Now makes me wonder what's happening to have them at the bottom of the barrel behind types such as Talk Talk!

But I'm a lot more dubious about VM. Maybe some of our commenters who use them could enlighten me. I had heard stories about them using various means to make sure that such speed tests are unhindered as much as possible, meanwhile other traffic is shaped to oblivion. Is that still the case in your opinion?

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Nope. Trafficshaping went away years ago. Or at least, traffic shaping intrusive enough to be noticeable. Tbh, when they were doing shaping and throttling they seemed to me to have a pretty fair approach.

If I hadn't moved to somewhere I can't get fibre, I'd still use VM. I'd got very used to 80mbits for the same price I now pay for <20.

[JetSetJim]

I'm with VM, it would not surprise me to find there's a list of speedtest providers that are not traffic shaped, but then it wouldn't surprise me if they all did that, so maybe there's a "level playing field" there! I have a 200mbps contract, I think, and speedtest.net currently reports it at 91mbps dl + 19mbps ul, but there's a wireless leg in the link and I'm on a conference call sharing that.

On the face of it I'm moderately happy with them - I've not noticed any throttling even throughout lockdown, but I've not been testing for it. Oftimes I've been running a VPN with video conferencing at the same time as SWMBO on a video conference and kids streaming something from Netflix and no-one has complained.

[Paul 195]

I'm using Virgin on their bottom tariff and we have three people in the household zooming and streaming with no real issues. Downloading big lumps like Visual Studio or Spring Tool Suite (Eclipse plus other bits) is fast. There have been occasional outages of a few hours, but nothing in the last year.

[The Original Steve]

TalkTalk are dire (as most consumer ISP's tend to be) with their customer service, and of course their security (or lack of it) is what they are most famous for.

However, that's not to knock their network itself. I was a very happy customer of their FTTC product until their "mega hack" a few years back. I left out of principle rather than due to their network performance which I always found to be rather good for a LLU FTTC product.

Crap customer service, horrific security and an utter lack of respect for their customers - but personally (and from what I've seen / been told from other geeks who were using the same TT LLU FTTC service as me) the product itself was nearly as good as you could get.

Remember that pretty much every location in the UK has a ton of ISP's reselling BT Wholesale IPStream, and then most have a few LLU providers such as TalkTalk and Sky. For me, my choices in my market town are some resold BT IPStream service, Sky and TalkTalk (no VM here) in terms of companies with their own fibre plumbed into the phone exchange data racks.

Not interested in a BT Wholesale product, and TalkTalk were the cheapest at the time and during my 3 years or so of being a customer their network performance was quite frankly great. BT, TT and Sky all have awful customer service. Along with thousands others, I left TT purely due to their disregard of my personal data and I'm now a happy Sky customer. Whilst there's not much in it, I'd even go as far as to say that TT may even have a slight edge in terms of performance.

[DreamEater]

Virgin

I’m a VM user and have been for over 10 years, where I live there is a old and “new” town VM.

The old town regularly suffers with outages and people not reaching their max speeds.

But the “new” town is almost flawless, in the last 7+ years I’ve been with VM at this location, I can count less than 10 occasions where the outage has been significant (I don’t count things being down for less than a few minutes)

My source is Facebook/word of mouth, looking at the local groups for the different parts of town, the old town probably complains once a month, where as the “new” part you only see a couple of times a year.

[Danny 2]

Re: Virgin

"The old town regularly suffers with outages and people not reaching their max speeds. But the “new” town is almost flawless"

Agreed. My city centre VM is noticeably faster and more reliable than the same plan at my parents house in their home town. I thought it may be because fewer of my neighbours were signed up.

[I don't want to confuse folk with 'new town' versus 'old town' because those terms mean completely different things here]

[AndrueC]

I used to be with PN but as their technical support degraded I got fed up of the struggle required to fix the issues. They were fine (fast and low latency) for a year at a time then you'd get a couple of months of shite and a major fight to get them to fix it.

Then there's the whole IPv6 thing. They rebuilt their network and rather than it heralding a new IPv6 compatible era it killed off the beta programme because the new network wasn't compatible with the test servers.

So I jumped ship for IDNet. Fewer reasons to talk to technical support but when I do I get sensible responses, problems are taken seriously and fixes put in place in a few days.

Oh and they've supported dual-stack IPv6/v4 for many years now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just come back from hols way out in the sticks, but the cottage had BT "fibre" internet. The speed tests showed 45Mb which is much faster than the speed tests I see at home. However all the sites I visited seemed much slower and iPlayer gave us loads of grief.

[Dave 126]

My friend is generally happy with his VM fibre connection on the outskirts of a big city... though there used to be an issue after heavy rain which the VM customer services said was due to a damp junction box.

My PlusNet isn't great, but the last issue was with the external telephone line, which they had BT OpenReach fix within a couple of days. The thick stone walls in the house don't help WiFi, but I suspect the PlusNet modem isn't great... I should be more scientific and methodically reduce the variables, but really I should look at when fibre is coming to the street.

[NeilPost]

You have not mentioned any of the WiFi devices or any WiFi congestion that hang off your PN Router.

Suggest you hard-wire with an Ethernet cable and retry... and take it from there.

[Terry 6]

I check my 200Mb VM service pretty frequently, with various different tests.

I get my 200. Across all the different tests, consistently. Even on Wifi to my phone I get 60+

And we've rarely had any downtime.

[NeilPost]

What’s your phone and how does it connect??

What other WiFi devices are within your local ecosystem??

[Anonymous Coward]

PN - OK up to a point...

... up to a point in time they had 24 hour support for residential users (still do for business), but sometime in recent years they cut the hours and ran only 0730 to 2200 (but it was rarely worth ringing after 2100 as they had such long queues you could still be left with "musak" playing at 2200 where a new caller would get an announcement that they were closed... and yes, I had waited a further hour before giving up, in case someone would get to the end of the queued callers... but no, no joy after 95+ minutes.

Was with them for over 15 years but they kept on doing lowest cost deals without having enough trained CS people to deal with the new customer queries, and obviously, when training new staff, that took some of the more experienced away. Then they stopped answering queries and fixing problems outlined on various web site fora - ISPreview, ThinkBroadband, etc (which had been a way to get long-standing problems dealt with, without someone needing to spend 10 minutes or longer reviewing all the comments from weeks or months with a difficult problem).

I eventually gave up when there were DNS lookups being lost, meaning that for much of the time, only 50% of site lookups were working. This meant that where a financial transaction was "going through" some of them would fail because of inevitable look-up problems leading to security issues. No, they never fixed that one.

Yes, cheap and (mostly) cheerful, but my last year or so was a constant drop in quality, month after month. Switching to FTTC was really just the start (getting 2 Mbps below the "guaranteed" 27 Mbps) and later being switched (which they argued they hadn't) unexpectedly and without notice after 6 months to a connection running at 40 Mbps (but with the DNS issues previously mentioned). I was quite OK with a damn reliable 25 Mbps that rarely had any problems, and a fixed IP, to a sub-standard 40 Mbps connection I could not trust.

Oh yes, and they did some merger/takeover but the billing system went nuts and some have had over a year without paying (yet... will see a lot of arguments, no doubt, when large bills eventually hit the carpets around the UK), and a fee of 25% added to the amount owed (so they can take 80% from the debt collection firm without PN losing a penny, but the customer will be left fuming).

[JetSetJim]

Am on Virgin, but miss being on Gigaclear

Apparently to get on this list, you need to be the source of >3% of the speed tests - but I wonder if that's skewed as perhaps people only check speeds when commissioning and when there's a problem.

[aidanstevens]

And people will be using wi-fi connections that are acting as the bottleneck.

[Lon24]

Sauce for Source?

BT faster than Zen or A&A? Not in my area of SE London. It would be good to see the real rather than cherry picked figures if we are to have confidence in these statistics. A link to the source would be good Reg.

[AW-S]

Re: Sauce for Source?

We switched from Zen to PlusNet earlier this year.

Been with Zen for 20 odd years, but their customer service became unsatisfactory and their call charges ridiculously high. Connected to the same Draytek router, PlusNet is not slower - and we have added a significant amount of video streaming traffic upload his summer.

All this should become academic next Easter when Toob connect us with FTTP at 900Mbps Symmetrical, for £25.00 a month. I hope the backhaul supports the opportunities that gives us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sauce for Source?

"BT faster than Zen or A&A? Not in my area of SE London. It would be good to see the real rather than cherry picked figures if we are to have confidence in these statistics. A link to the source would be good Reg."

Are you looking at a different article to me? Zen and A&A aren't even mentioned. And the article does have a link to the source, near the beginning. Maybe they added it after you commented??? And the source doesn't mention Zen or A&A either, so what sauce are you on?

[NeilPost]

Re: Sauce for Source?

I think it’s just a reader anecdote. I’m sure Zen etc are in Ookla’s report.

Don’t be so harsh.

[Anonymous Coward]

How "fair" is this to ISPs?

I'm with Plusnet, and the only "restriction" on the speed of my 80/20 connection is that due to the BT infrastructure (i.e. the copper aluminium cable to the cabinet and the ever increasing levels of cross-talk).

Would be more useful to see what percentage of sync speeds users get rather than complaining that ISP 'X' gives low speeds when that's not down to them.

[GlenP]

Re: How "fair" is this to ISPs?

I'm on Plusnet too, and close to the cabinet with newish (<10 year old) copper wiring.

The restriction is on the internal networking, i.e. I'll get 72+ up on a wired connection from a fast laptop, I'll get a lot less than that on a slow device over WiFi at the far end of the house (or did until I put a repeater in).

For the sake of argument as Plusnet are a budget provider do they have a greater number of people with older slower kit connected?

[druck]

Re: How "fair" is this to ISPs?

PlusNet have supplied some shockingly bad routers, so I'm not surprised speed is slow if that is what customers are using. The last one from them I binned had 100BaseT Ethernet and a weedy 802.11N signal that would struggle at ADSL speeds, never mind fibre.

The connection itself (via BT) is fine, 76Mbit/s down and 17Mbit/s up, as we are lie of site to the cabinet.

Using either gigabit Ethernet or 802.11ac to a good Asus router we have had no problems during lock down, with both the wife and I on video calls to work, and the children watching Netflix or Amazon Prime on two or more TVs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How "fair" is this to ISPs?

I've been with Plusnet since before they were bought by BT and called Plusnet. I've stuck with them for so long because i've always found their service to be good, and their customer service superb on the rare occasions I've ever needed to contact it.

I had occasion to speak to their customer support recently to check whether an email I'd been sent, apparently from them, was genuine or not (it wasnt) and during the course of the call was told that their customer base tends to be older than average. Whether age may shape expectations of performance, I have no idea, but my main source of entertainment is YouTube, and about the only time I notice any issues is when watching live streams of SpaceX launches, when about half the time I'll see some degree of buffering. (Shrugs) YMMV. I'm entirely happy with Plusnet.

[Anonymous Coward]

help our customers stay connected to what’s next

so what is next?

[DJV]

Re: help our customers stay connected to what’s next

Well, definitely not IPv6 if you're on Vermin Media! I think they are waiting for the heat death of the universe before they roll it out...

[Boris the Cockroach]

Vermin media here

Good : Speed, hardly ever drops out (glares at a 16 yr old trainee JCB driver on a local bridge resurfacing project... that happens to have the vermin media feed for the entire city running over it too... )

Bad : price

ugly : 'customer service' (to be fair its not their fault, stuck in a call center reading a script at a point of a gun .... just pray you get escalated to 2nd level help)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Vermin media here

I'm on the same boat re. virgin, i.e. good speed, but price gouging because of actual virgin monopoly (other options are shitty landline-broadband deals). My only hope (obi-wan) is that, at some point, 5G becomes popular enough to force virgin into real competition.

That said, there's hardly any incentive for over-the-air home braodband connection deals, because almost all people are f... glued to their phones, and that's convenient to service providers who block tethering, to keep it this way.

[JetSetJim]

Re: Vermin media here

> service providers who block tethering

Err - no-one blocks tethering nowadays (in the UK, at least), although some may have caps on it in some circumstances (e.. PAYG) but even they're reasonably generous

https://www.choose.co.uk/guide/tether-mobile-phone-wifi-hotspot.html

[Badbob]

Re: Vermin media here

Tried to sign up to Vermin about 6 weeks ago. Was happy with BT service, but peeved at never ending price rises (which they wouldn’t negotiate on).

Signed the contract with VM who promptly informed BT to terminate my service (because of number porting). Then, 3 days before install a text arrives telling me that due to a “construction issue” my installation would be delayed indefinitely. Calls to Customer Service were a complete waste of time and their “pre install team” kept cutting us off after 45mins on hold.

Decided to cut our losses and beg BT to halt the termination of our service, as we couldn’t be without service for much more than a few days due to my better half keeping the wheels of high finance rolling from our study at the moment. BT duly obliged and logged a complaint for us about VM not being able to provide the service they sold (which apparently goes to Ofcom as misselling).

Cue the next calls to VM to cancel our installation and contract. Only took 4 phone calls and 6 hours.

Still left BT the following week though, for one of their subsidiaries providing the same service for half the price.

[Wellyboot]

Internet speed is relative to what you do with it.

Can the up/download rate keep up with activity, that's a Y/N answer changing by the second.

By 'you' I mean everyone sharing the bandwidth, this is dependant on what contention ratio you're getting, cheapskate ISPs use up to 100:1, Business links can be dedicated 1:1 (cost is a lot more), that's why a 500 person remote office can easily work with 'only' a 80mb/s internet link.

The best ISP for you will be the one that has a relatively low¹ user count in your area² and has an underused backhaul to the backbone, this will usually be just after a local upgrade. (because it was getting overloaded and customers were complaining?)

Basically national ISP speed comparisons only give an overall index of the current relative state of their individual networks. When they work they're all ok³. when they go wrong it's customer service that matters.

¹ relative to the available bandwidth on either its own hardware or piggybacked onto another carrier (BT mostly).

² The area is everything connected to your street box and the upstream link from the next exchange towards the backbone.

³ None of this helps those unfortunates waiting last in line for the tins & string replacement.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a huge issue here

By default, Ookla choses your geographically closest server.

Most (all?) DSL links in the UK hit the internet at telehouse in London, so whilst the "closest" server would be in London, the server Ookla choses as local to you means you are adding more internet delays than should be necessary.

It's such an obvious issue, I've never been able to take any of their data claims seriously.

(NB. I'm not saying the other speedtest apps are better. Probably many do similar, but I've never used them.)

[AndrueC]

Re: There's a huge issue here

All speed tests are flawed in that way. They only tell you the characteristics of the link between you and a server that you will never use for anything else.

Running a speed test every couple of days is good for general monitoring. Learn what the results look like and you can spot things going on. When you first switch to an ISP running one at different times can be informative. If certain times of day show a dip that means you're with an ISP that is running a hot network. A good ISP will provide the same throughput 24/7/52.

And a speed test that will do single threaded and multi threaded tests is essential. Multi threaded tests can hide issues since by their nature they max out bandwidth. A good connection has multi and single threaded results looking much the same:

Peak hours and my connection is running fine. Couple of dips on the single threaded test but nothing of significance.

[NeilPost]

Re: There's a huge issue here

My SamKnow’s Whitebox seems a better overall measure. Just sits there 24x365 collecting telemetry data and uploading it.

All Speedtest tools are flawed and time of test objective only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There's a huge issue here

Those monthly SamKnows reports are fun. My 200Mbps VM connection usually comes back as "average " of 219.4Mbps each month. Kinda funny seeing the consistancy in the reports. On a bad month it may drop the "Min" to 74Mbps.

The nice thing I like about VM is the lack of excuses. They own the router, the cable from your house to the cabinet, and the whole of the cable back to the office. When there is a rare issue a call to the call centre is usually greeted with an automate message telling you they know there is an issue.

Look at any of the BT Resellers and you have the headaches of excuses from blaming your house phone cabling, router, cost of sending out an Openreach engineer, etc etc excuses...

If I ever move house I'll check there is VM there first. I've been on a VM line for 18 years now...

Yeah - the Cable Routers are buggy - but mine is in Modem mode. Zero problems.

[20legend]

We're with PN on the 80/20 package and get 79/19 - replaced the supplied router with a cheap BT Smart Hub off the bay.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance these tests were sponsored by ISPs ?

Then there is always a bias in how the samples are chosen and data assimilated.

Meanwhile ... you can prove anything with statistics, but the turth.

[Clunking Fist]

Re: Any chance these tests were sponsored by ISPs ?

I am still assessing the turthiness of your assertion...

[Booh]

Where are the pedants?

The article says "Virgin’s network is largely based on FTTN (fibre-to-the-node), with last-mile cabling based on Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) wires." but there is no such thing as Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) wires...it's only a copper coaxial cable in the last mile.

It's an HFC network because it uses a combination of fibre and coax in different segments, not some exotic hybrid drop wire!

[NeilPost]

Re: Where are the pedants?

What ...!! and Virgin Media give you the impression in their adverts it’s full fibre.

Bastards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky’s the limit

I’m with sky personally and although provisionally the speed at my front door is 58mbps you will never received anything other than 21mbps over WiFi regardless. However, I’ve got commercial grade Cisco switch’s and APs all over the house and enjoy exactly 58mbps wirelessly too. It’s not difficult to run a script to run a speed test from a Raspberry Pi every hour and then forward any less than satisfactory results to your ISP. I was testing in UCL a few years ago and even the 960mbps was limited by the Gigabit Ethernet card we were experimenting with. What’s the point of having over 100mbps when most people’s network card will be 100mbps or 150mbps N wirelessly. FTTD On single mode 9/125 is a long way off

[rg287]

Re: Sky’s the limit

Speak for yourself. I'm using a BT Smart Hub with PlusNet and whilst 802.11n will suffice for the 40/10 service I subscribe to, I can bounce off the limits of the -ac when doing file transfers to my Synology.

Granted, most people don't have a home NAS or any local traffic (other than things like peer-to-peer Windows updates that they're not even aware of), but more or less every bit of consumer electronics sold with an ethernet jack in the past 10 years will be GigE, and every non-landfill phone for the past 5 will be -ac capable.

Most houses are full of devices which could crack 250Mb/s given the chance - from consoles & TVs to sub-£300 Chromebooks. I'm a digital hoarder, always 2-3 years behind the curve (I never buy the latest model, and certainly not on release day!) but everything in my house bar the printer and Kindle Paperwhite can go >100Mb.

FTTD (or indeed fibre as an access layer to anything other than servers) has always struck me as pointless unless you have very specific, niche requirements. In business you can't run PoE to a desk phone (or access points) over fibre whilst in most domestic settings cable runs are unlikely to exceed 10-20metres, which comfortably covers GigE and even 10GBaseT if you really want.

[NeilPost]

Re: Sky’s the limit

That’s garbage - a quick Speedtest (Ookla) on my iPhone gives an immediate 49Mbit on my Sky Fibre - 5Ghz 11.ac to a Sky Broadband Hub.

You don’t have a shitty old 11g WiFi laptop do you ??

[weirdbeardmt]

Larry the loafer

Is the nPerf rep suggesting Ookla’s data masher is just a puppet?

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

VM

Not going to get into the minutiae of what sort of final mile cabling they use as quite honestly I don't care, but I am on VMs £35pm 100MBPs service and considering I do rely on it for regular work, my day trading workstation and internet radio / streaming it has always been reliable and speedy. If I turn my VPN off and just run a native speed test it regularly says between 90 - 110MBPs which is fair enough. If I turn my VPN on I still generally get the same throughput, but then again I have the WAN connection feeding into a high end AX SOHO router.

I don't really ever have much call to engage with their customer services, but whenever I have it has always been a nightmare. But I assume this to be the case for any sort of service / utility provider these days so I guess it's pretty difficult to read anything into that.

[hoola]

Speedtests, next to pointless

Speed tests provide a metric that is used by providers and then these comparison organisations to claim all sorts of figures. The criteria should be:

Is it reliable?

Is the speed fast enough for the job is is being required to do?

Is the latency good?

Is it cost-effective?

Having a 1GB connection for home use is just a willy-waving statistic. Unless everything is hard-wired you will not get that to the router (and for most, people Wifi is the connection of choice) you will not even get that internally. The connection may sync at 1GB but then what? Do people really believe that they have that bandwidth all the way to the destination?

I have been on PlusNet for years, ADSL and then FTTC. The only concession has been to replace the router with something more configurable that includes the modem part (Fritz! Box). The connection is 78/19 most of the time but particularly on a Sunday evening there is clearly contention at the exchange. It still claims to be at 78/19 and a speed test the same. The reality is that things take longer to load or download.

[Terry Barnes]

This survey is reasonably useless if it doesn’t record what package people have bought. Most people buy the cheapest thing available where they live. Having a low score for throughout is more a function of the customers an ISP attracts than it is a measure of network performance.

My parents are on talktalk ADSL but live in a street covered by both Virgin’s HFC network and Openreach’s FTTP. They’ve chosen to buy a service that runs at about 12Mbps, but they have available to them services running twenty times faster.

[raglits]

Plusnet user here too

Been with them since we moved out of a Virgin media area and coming up to renewal time again. Assuming this works that same way as last time I'll tell them I'm going to move ISP and they'll match the price of the competitor. One phone call every 18 to 24 months is something I can deal with, especially as the static IP address was a one off charge of £5.

OK, the download speeds are slower than the Virgin package we were on but the upload is actually better and when you're sharing a Plex server with a few family members this is welcome. I run speed tests at random and almost always get 68 down, 18 up.

The standard router is pretty awful (unless they've improved it since I signed up over 3 1/2 years ago), the connection speed was fine but the wifi was rubbish (not great range and would occasionally stop broadcasting altogether) but with a combination of some Draytek kit for connecting to the internet and a wifi mesh system for the majority of kit in the house we don't have any issues (apart from one Nokia phone that really doesn't seem to like staying connected to the wifi).

[Anonymous Coward]

BT only real option here

I live in a village in NE Scotland, so forget VM bothering to provide anything like a universal service here.

Been with BT since moving here; just phone at first, then IDSN, then ADSL and, finally fibre. Rarely any problems and, when there has been, it’s been fixed promptly by BT/Openreach.

I consistently get 30Mbps+ which is plenty for my wife and I. The broadband part of my contract is £3 more than the basic line rental. I’ve looked at the likes of Sky and others but why add an extra company in the supply chain? If I phone with a query, it gets fixed, unlike an elderly friend on TT who was without phone or broadband for 2 months whilst TT got it fixed (and I know they initially passed it on to Openreach but the fix ended up back with them).

As an example of BT service, one incident was when a tree in my garden wore through the overhead line into the house - a new line was run from pole within a few days and I got a compensation payment (around a quarter’s line rental) for the inconvenience - of which there wasn’t a lot as I had two lines and the fault only affected one. It was the line I used for the modem, so just took over the house line when dialling out.

As always, YMMV.

[Anonymous Coward]

as for 5g the highest I got in the centre of Plymouth PL1 was 131Mbps switching to 4g LTE gave 68mbps, interestingly upload on 5g was only 17mbps LTE got as high as 29Mbps!

[Colonel Mad]

5G

Of more interest is their 5G map, compare us in the UK with the republic of Ireland!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vm500

I'm on vm 500 and fast.com reports 550mbps. In actual real wild tests i hover at 60MB/sec. Very often 62MB/sec which is over provision i suspect. This is in Bradford on using a hub 4. Install is about a month old and they didn't have a hub 3 so installed the 4

[spireite]

Re: Vm500

Real wild?

My cat plays with my ethernet cabling, but I guess you have tigers and lions - their impact on your speed will be higher