Glasgow is the UK’s most ‘unequal’ city for broadband speeds

The Scottish city’s best served areas clock speeds 866 times faster than the slowest areas, which are just four miles away, says Uswitch.

Having run an analysis of 16,500 consumer speed tests, Uswitch.com has ingloriously crowned Glasgow as the UK’s most unequal city for broadband connections. The highest average download speed was clocked at 840.4Mbps in the Milton district, while four miles away in the suburb of Bearsden, speeds were registered as low as a paltry 0.97Mbps.

By way of explanation, we’re told this equates to Glaswegians in the slowest areas waiting 11 hours 54 minutes to download a two-hour movie in HD, while in the quickest it would take only 49 seconds.

The next worst city for broadband speed equality is Nottingham, with its top recorded speed 689 times faster than its slowest 1.16Mbps connection, followed by similar stories in Cardiff, London and Newcastle.

“While the average UK broadband speed is increasing year on year, not everyone is benefiting,” said Ernest Doku, broadband expert at Uswitch.com. “We are seeing a large and growing gap between customers benefiting from ultrafast speeds and those who are getting the bare minimum. Legacy copper-wire broadband services often struggle to cope with the demands placed on them by busy households with many devices online, and are also more likely to suffer from outages.

“Yet advances in technology and the rollout of infrastructure means that millions of customers have far faster options on their doorstep. And competition among providers offering full fibre services has also helped to deliver better value to consumers. Where once, switching to a faster package involved a jump in bills, nowadays you can often upgrade your package at the end of your deal without paying more. So there’s never been a better time to review your options.”

Measuring such things will presumably reveal widening gaps between the fastest and slowest connections in any number of places across the world since ongoing fibre rollouts means much faster broadband services are available, but not everywhere yet. One would assume as the rollout advances, this gap between speeds will level out.

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