Kent City branded Britain’s broadband snail

Recent research has uncovered that the cathedral city of Canterbury in southeast England is the UK’s slowest when it comes to broadband speed.

The news follows completion of analysis by Broadband Genie, the popular internet speed comparison website.

The site conducted a study that compiled data from over 265,000 internet speed tests performed by users. The Kent settlement took the title of slowest city broadband ahead of North Yorkshire’s Ripon, Carlisle, Chester and Worcester. According to Broadband Genie’s statistics, Canterbury has average broadband speeds of a little over 34 megabytes per second.

Broadband expert Alex Tofts, for the comparison website, said:

“No broadband customer should accept a sub-par service, least of all in a year when we have seen record price increases in the industry.”

He added that most of the biggest broadband providers in Britain have signed up to “Broadband Speeds Code of Practice” established by Ofcom, and urged users to carry out speed test to ensure they are getting the service they have been promised.

Contrastingly, the city with the speediest broadband was Belfast, with an average of 152 megabytes per second. The capital of Northern Ireland topped other close contenders like Plymouth, Portsmouth, Milton Keynes and Derry.

When it comes to the smaller locations, Halkirk, a village located in the Scottish Highlands, had the slowest overall broadband in the UK, with users struggling with speeds as slow as 2.8 megabytes per second. However, another Scottish village had the UK’s fastest broadband, as Renfrewshire’s Lochwinnoch had average internet speeds of 409.2 megabytes per second.