Oxford 'has world’s fifth-fastest connection speed' (From Oxford Mail)

Oxford 'has world’s fifth-fastest connection speed'

6:30am Friday 23rd April 2010 in News By Dan Hearn

INTERNET surfers in Oxford enjoy the fifth fastest broadband speeds in the world, a new report claims.

An average connection speed of 14.5 megabytes per second (mbps) puts the city above Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The findings by US internet monitoring firm Akamai Technologies reveal Oxford is the only UK city in the top 10, 68 places ahead of rival university city Cambridge.

However, internet users and service providers last night questioned the report and the impact on residents outside the universities.

Adrian Hicks runs an IT class for people in Rose Hill.

The 35-year-old, from Littlemore, said: “I can’t believe for a second this is true.

“I have never experienced broadband speeds this fast anywhere in the city.”

Elliot Ing works at technology firm Computer Assistance in Oxford Road.

He said: “If we have the fifth-fastest broadband in the world, everybody else’s must be rubbish.

“It seems these results are being skewed by the university, which has a super-fast connection and will hugely boost the average.

“The bottom line is that your average internet user sitting at home will be getting speeds which are nowhere near this level.”

Fast broadband speeds depend on the cables used by the service provider and how far the user is from the exchange.

One internet expert said it was “unclear” why Oxford had recorded such high results.

Sebastian Lahtinen, co-founder of thinkbroadband.com, said: “It is an area that has been enabled for BT’s 21C network so broadband line speeds could be higher due to this, or take-up of higher speed services from Virgin Media could be more predominant here.

“Oxford is close to the ‘M4 corridor’ of high-tech companies, so it could see an increase in speed due to the people who live in the area craving faster broadband.”

Oxford was one of only four British cities to make the top 100, along with Southampton (57th), Bristol (58th) and Cambridge (73rd).

Berkeley and Stanford in California, Chapel Hill in North Carolina and Masan in South Korea top the list.

The UK failed to make the overall top 10 countries list.

BT spokesman Chris Orum said: “These are astonishing results – I don’t see how they can be possible. We are very pleased with our broadband in Oxford, but these results are almost unobtainable.”

Akamai analysed internet speeds for the last three months of 2009, filtering out small cities by measuring locations with at least 50,000 unique IP addresses.

Virgin Media spokesman Gareth Mead said: “It’s great that Oxford, a city steeped in learning and innovation, has been recognised as being at the forefront of the digital world.”

dhearn@oxfordmail.co.uk