The latest set of broadband speed test results from broadband comparison  site broadband.co.uk have been released and show no surprise with Virgin Media still topping the fastest broadband charts.

For the first time however, Virgin Media (www.virginmedia.com) have finally gone through the 9Mb average broadband speed barrier by registering an average broadband speed of 9.373Mb which is over 1.1Mb faster than they were last month and still way ahead of the broadband providers in second place of O2 & Be broadband (Be are owned by O2 and use the same network) who registered an average broadband speed of 5.654Mb.

Virgin Media are currently the safe first spot on these broadband speed tests as they have fibre optic broadband that has a headline speed of 50Mb. However, fibre optic networks are currently being installed by BT across the UK so we should start to hopefully see the broadband speeds start to rise for those broadband providers who use BT’s wholesale network via BT Infinity or another broadband provider.

The full table of the main broadband providers who are featured in the results and what their respective download speeds are is shown below:

1. Virgin Media – 9.373Mb
2. O2 & Be Broadband – 5.654Mb
3. Sky Broadband – 3.734Mb
4. Orange – 3.682Mb
5. BT Broadband – 3.582Mb
6. TalkTalk & Tiscali – 3.511Mb
7. Eclipse Internet – 3.455Mb
8. PlusNet – 2.811Mb
9. AOL – 2.251Mb

The average broadband speed recorded from all the broadband providers was 4.958Mb so we would expect that next month we will finally see the average broadband speed hit the 5Mb marker which if so will have taken 13 months to achieve form when it finally went over the 4Mb mark.
Largely this will be down to Virgin Media who have in the last year added 3Mb to their average broadband speed, however O2/Be Broadband have actually gone backwards in the last year by being around 0.4Mb slower.

The average broadband upload speeds were also measured and the average across all the broadband providers was 0.482Mb, it is actually O2/Be who lead the way on the uploading speeds with Virgin Media in second place.

1. O2 & Be Broadband – 0.729Mb
2. Virgin Media – 0.594Mb
3. Sky Broadband – 0.475Mb
4. Orange – 0.448Mb
5. BT Broadband – 0.401Mb
6. TalkTalk/Tiscali – 0.348Mb
7. Eclipse Internet – 0.396Mb
8. PlusNet – 0.337Mb
9. AOL – 0.319Mb