Study: Latency Testing British Broadband Providers

People often say that certain broadband providers are a better choice than others if you like to play online games. In fact, many ISPs advertise that they are a particularly good choice for gamers.

The thing that matters most to online gamers is latency, which measures how quickly your connection can send and receive packets of data to and from the game server you’re playing on.

But is it really true that certain broadband providers offer significantly lower latency than others?

The study

We used RIPE Atlas to assess the latency of the UK’s biggest broadband networks.

RIPE Atlas is an online tool that allows us to test residential broadband connections located around the country, enabling us to measure the real-world latency of different broadband providers.

The tool also makes it possible to run ping tests from the same part of the country, allowing us to control for the effects of physical distance in our tests.

We ran a series of ping tests, more than 400 in total, to measure the average latency that each ISP offers at peak and off-peak times of day, both within the UK and overseas.

Pinging from London to Manchester – off-peak

Pinging from London to Manchester – on-peak

Pinging from London to Frankfurt – off-peak

Pinging from London to Frankfurt – on-peak

Verdict

From our testing, YouFibre consistently showed the lowest ping results, while Community Fibre and Hyperoptic also performed well, especially internationally.

All Openreach providers also offered strong performance, with relatively little difference between them, while CityFibre offered about middle-of-the-road latency results compared to the other networks we tested.

Virgin Media consistently had a higher ping than the other providers on the market, averaging around 30ms within the UK and overseas, compared to 12-18ms with Openreach.

Fortunately though, for most online gamers, a ping of 30ms still offers very responsive performance, and you are unlikely to notice a difference between 15ms and 30ms most of the time.

However, if you live a long way away from where most servers are hosted, such as in Scotland, and you play very competitive online games, like Counter Strike, you may want to choose a broadband provider that offers a slightly lower average ping.

In terms of consistency, Openreach led the way, with Community Fibre and YouFibre also performing well.

Interestingly, it made very little difference whether we performed our ping tests during peak or off-peak times of day. From London to Manchester, our average off-peak reading was 12.853ms, and on-peak it was 12.885ms. And from London to Frankfurt, our average ping was actually slightly higher during off-peak testing.

Metholodogy

For each of the broadband networks we tested, we chose a RIPE Probe (in other words, a testing node for sending requests) located as close to the centre of London as possible. Each of the Probes we used was located in Greater London, and used a wired connection to the host router.

For Virgin Media, due to the higher-than-average ping results we were seeing, we confirmed our results using another Probe on their network. The included data is for the node that performed best out of the two Virgin Media connections we tested.

From each Probe, we then pinged a RIPE Anchor (another type of testing node, for receiving requests) located in the centre of Manchester. We then ran the tests again from the same Probes, but with a new Anchor located in the centre of Frankfurt.

We ran 10 ping measurements per ISP, per period of day that we tested, and per location we sent our ping requests to.

Off-peak tests were conducted from 12pm-3pm, and on-peak tests were run from 6pm-9pm. All tests were performed on weekdays.

The limitation of our research is that we did not assess other large providers unavailable in London, because we needed to ensure the measurements were taken at the same distance between all Probes and the testing target.

It is also possible that individual aspects of some of the connections we tested, such as network load and the router used, affected latency results slightly. This is why we confirmed the validity of our results using other Probes on the same network, and ran hundreds of tests at different times of day, to shed light on typical performance based on a large sample size.

About the author

Tyler Bevan

Tyler is the co-founder of Broadband Savvy. He has been helping people improve their broadband connectivity since 2018 by writing about fibre broadband and mobile broadband providers, as well as creating tutorials to help people improve their broadband speeds and Wi-Fi signal.

Tyler is responsible for the majority of buyer’s guides and broadband reviews published on Broadband Savvy. He has a wealth of experience testing and reviewing different broadband tariffs, including fibre internet plans, as well as 4G and 5G broadband deals. He is responsible for testing and evaluating Wi-Fi routers, performing speed and latency tests, and comparing the value for money of different broadband providers on the market in the UK.

Before co-founding Broadband Savvy, Tyler had a long history of tinkering with computers. He built his first PC at the age of 12, and since then, he’s become obsessed with all things networking and internet-related. He’s a massive gamer, loves Rocket League, and also plays Sunday League football.