Ofcom’s review of broadband market in Hull and East Yorkshire
Ofcom, the communications industry regulator, has published the initial findings of its latest market review into the broadband market in Hull and East Yorkshire.
New report shows quality of Lightstream
Lightstream broadband is among the best performing in the UK according to a new Ofcom report.
The communications regulator’s UK Home Broadband Performance Report, released today, shows KCOM’s Lightstream is among the UK’s top performers when it comes to delivering ultrafast full fibre broadband. Although it evaluated one of the slowest Lightstream services, the report shows KCOM’s full fibre service is delivering on its speed and reliability promises and is outperforming rival services throughout the UK.
KCOM managing director Sean Royce, said: “It’s great to see this independent report shows Lightstream is doing ‘exactly what it says on the tin’ and delivering the speeds, performance and reliability it promises.
“We knew investing in a full fibre network would provide Hull and East Yorkshire with the gold standard for broadband. Now our Lightstream rollout is complete everyone can enjoy the benefits of our award-winning Lightstream.
“Although the report only looks at KCOM’s 75Mbps service, one of our lowest speed packages, I’m delighted to see that it compares very favourably with, in many key areas, other providers’ faster products.
“What’s even better is that we have plenty of even faster Lightstream packages – providing up to 900Mbps to homes across Hull and East Yorkshire – that are leaving our competitors far behind in the rear-view mirror.”
The report is based on data gathered by industry experts SamKnows and compares the performance of home broadband services across the UK.
It says: “Reliable, high-speed broadband connectivity is an essential part of life for many people in the UK. Four in five households have a fixed broadband connection, and increasing use of bandwidth-hungry activities such as online video streaming services, which are used in more than 12 million UK homes, mean that the need for fast, reliable home broadband has never been greater.”
Among its findings are that 100 per cent of KCOM’s Lightstream 75Mbps connections enabled customers to stream Netflix content without buffering. In comparison, 91 per cent of Sky’s 36Mbps Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) connections and 98 per cent of Virgin Media’s 350Mbps cable connections streamed without buffering.
The Lightstream service also outperformed those of other providers for the time web pages take to load, at less than 100 milliseconds both on average and at peak times. Virgin’s 350Mbps cable service took just under 300 milliseconds.
In its measurement of latency, which is the time it takes for broadband to respond to a request for information from the internet and is crucial for gamers, the report shows KCOM’s Lightstream 75Mbps service delivered an impressive response time of 7.5 milliseconds. This compared to Virgin’s 350Mbps cable service’s 17 milliseconds and Plusnet’s 66Mbps service’s 12 milliseconds.
The report also found KCOM’s 75Mbps service’s average minimum speed was 96 per cent of the average maximum speed, comparing well to BT’s 145Mbps and 300Mbps services, which delivered average minimum speeds of 94 per cent and 92 per cent of their maximum respectively.