U.K. average broadband speed up by 20 percent, but rural divide widens

Britain. Home of rolling hills, tea and crumpets, and cacophonies of hooded youths shouting abuse from their streetside benches at elderly passers-by.

And now, it’s also now home to significantly faster broadband — at least by comparison to its friendly American counterparts, where the broadband speed is roughly half the connection speed to the average U.K. household, according to latest figures from U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom.

The regulator said on Thursday that the U.K.’s average broadband speed has shot up to 14.7 Mbps, up from 12 Mbps in March. (Akamai’s figures from April suggest the U.K.’s average broadband speed of about 7 Mbps, while the U.S. was slightly faster at 8 Mbps.)

Say we go with the official U.K. figures. The bright side suggests that is a 300 percent increase in broadband speed from 3.6 Mbps since November 2008 when Ofcom first published average U.K. household speeds.

SOURCE: zdnet.com