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Cable comes out ahead in speed test.

# 28 July 2009, 09:38 by stuart

Cable has highest average speed according to Ofcom. Virgin’s 10 meg product had an average speed of nearly twice that offered by 8 Meg ADSL ISPs. VM’s 20 meg product was fastest overall.

VM have beaten all the ADSL ISPs in a test of average speed conducted by OFCOM.

Customers on Virgins up to 10 MBps service attained average speeds that are nearly twice those of to 8MBps ADSL customers.

The tests found that in April 2009, the average broadband speed was 4.1MBps.

However, while VM’s 10 Meg product did well, the 20 Meg product did less well. It was the fastest broadband service in the 1,600 home sample, but averaged only 13 meg. Significantly lower than the advertised speed.

The top 8 DSL ISPs offered speeds ranging from 3.2 – 5.1 MBps. The fastest ISPs were O2, Orange, Plusnet, Sky and Talk Talk. AOL and Tiscali were the slowest.

http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2009/07/28/cable-ahead-in-ofcom-speed-test/

Now, while it is interesting to see that VM (at least on cable) is apparently the fastest ISP, it’s worth noting that they don’t have one of the disadvantages of ADSL. Distance The average ISP will have users a long way away from their nearst access point. This isn’t a problem for cable, but is for ADSL. Having said that, the fact that AOL (who use ADSL2+) are slower than Plusnet (who use ADSL), so distance isn’t always much of a problem.

The real problem for Virgin is that Cable doesn’t have that excuse, yet, on it’s 20 meg product at least, the average customer is paying for nearly twice the bandwidth they are getting.

It’s also worth noting that a few ISPs have complained that the sample size (1,600 homes) is too small to be meaningful.

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