BBC collects broadband speed data (Updated)
The BBC news website is offering a broadband speed test and an interactive mapping facility at bbc.co.uk.
Unfortunately their instant speedtest appears to give very low results, for example around 2Mbps when Thinkbroadband reports 7Mbps on the same connection, and there will be some potential bias in respondents being self selected rather than a representative cross section.
The general theme that “people living in the countryside may find their service is considerably slower than those in urban areas” may not be fully born out in practice, for example one village in the middle of the Lakes can provide at least 6Mbps to all the lines it serves in a compact community.
There are however real differences in service availability - rural areas are unlikely to have Cable or ADSL2+ “up to 24M” services - but it is possible to have long and poor quality phone lines in a modern city as much as in the countryside, as residents of Milton Keynes know to their cost.
Update: The BBC have been in touch to say that they’ve since updated their speed tester to use a larger file, with the aim of increasing accuracy on faster connections. Reports on various forums around the Internet suggest that this has had a positive effect.
Tags: BBC, Thinkbroadband
