Reliable, high-speed broadband connectivity is an essential part of life for many people in the UK.
Four in five households have a fixed broadband connection, and increasing use of data-hungry activities such as video streaming services (which are used in more than 12 million UK homes) mean that the need for fast, reliable home broadband has never been greater.
To gain insight into the overall performance delivered by UK residential broadband providers, Ofcom has commissioned technical partner SamKnows to set up a panel of consumers who have a monitoring unit connected to their router. This enables us to make a robust assessment of the performance delivered by different services and how they vary by a number of factors including technology, service provider, package, geography and time of day.
Our home broadband performance reports are based on tests run in November of each year. We measure the performance that the internet service provider (ISP) delivers to the consumer’s router. The actual performance delivered to consumers’ devices varies as it is affected by several factors including wifi performance, in-house contention (i.e. when more than one device is connected to the wifi), device limitations and the performance of servers delivering content consumed over the connection.
The technical methodology is available as Annex 2 and the statistical methodology as Annex 3.
Full report
UK home broadband performance, measurement period November 2018 - Chart data (CSV, 162.9 KB)
UK home broadband performance, measurement period November 2018 - Panellist data (CSV, 1.8 MB)
UK home broadband performance, measurement period November 2018 - Interactive data