"Looking back to a year ago when the average speed was only 3.2Mbps we can see how far things have improved," said Edd Dawson from broadband.co.uk. The results were calculated from thousands of broadband speed tests taken on the broadband.co.uk site during April 2009 by ordinary broadband users UK wide.
Dawson continued: "However, we hear more and more complaints from consumers regarding their broadband speeds. Far more rich media is being consumed in comparison to a year ago, BBC iPlayer being a prime example, and it seems that as fast as ISP's add capacity they still don't manage to keep up with their customers expectations. So although we should congratulate the industry for continuing to move forward we must not allow them to rest on their laurels."
At the individual provider level Virgin retained its lead as the UK's fastest broadband provider for the seventh month in a row, though O2 is snapping at its heels.
New metric data has been added to the broadband.co.uk monthly results, now providing data that shows how much of a connections theoretical speed is actually provided on average by individual suppliers. This month Virgin Media fibre optic wins, providing 125% of the speed that would be available to a standard ADSL user in its areas. Bottom of the pile is Tiscali and Eclipse with only 49% of the maximum speed available supplied on average.