Virgin tops broadband speed leaderboard

Broadband speed tests have revealed that Virgin Media has become the new speed king, overtaking rival provider O2 for the first time.

Average September download speeds over Virgin’s service were 6.128Mbps, trumping O2 who came in second at 5.321Mbps.

Both O2 and Virgin offer high speed packages of 20Mbps, helping to skew the results in their favour.

Virgin Media’s lead is expected to increase even further as it rolls out its 50Mbps service over the next few months.

O2, however, still tops the leaderboard for upload speeds at 0.81Mbps, followed by Virgin in second place at 0.46Mbps.

The bottom five in the testing all trail O2 and Virgin by a long way.

TalkTalk, BT, Plusnet, AOL and Eclipse were all found to have average download speeds under 2.5Mbps.

Analysts at broadband.co.uk put the results together using thousands of broadband speed tests done by ordinary broadband users.