Be and O2 suffered a Slowdown Last Year

The leading broadband providers operating in the United Kingdom, O2 and Be Broadband had witnessed its customers suffer due to a considerable service slowdown in December 2009. It has been revealed that this incident contrasted the still continuing trend of improving broadband speeds in the market.

As a matter of fact, the download speeds of the two leading home broadband providers owned by Telefonica – therefore using the same network – on an average, dropped by 13 per cent to around 5Mbps, according to the speed-tests based on the internet.

It is also interesting that the broadband comparison website has carried out the research and also it has highlighted the strain on the broadband network used by Be and O2, while their ADSL competitors reasonably contributed to an overall 22 per centmarket surge in average internet access speeds.

It is also worth mentioning here that Be Broadband is the internet service provider in the United Kingdom to pioneer the ADSL2+ broadband technology that realized access speeds of up to 24Mbps in the country. The ISP was subsequently acquired by O2, which then saw the launch of a number of bundle packages, which meant that the network had to bear ten of thousands users additionally.

However, in spite of the slow down in broadband speeds, Be and O2 jointly delivered the second best average speeds, according to the research where Virgin Media secured the accolade for the fastest broadband supplier.