Recent research has revealed that businesses in the UK have faster broadband speeds than ever before.

According to the BBUS Business Survey, the number of companies with speeds in excess of 10Mbps rose from 18 per cent to 25 per cent between October 2007 and May 2008.

In addition, 13 per cent of firms have already installed systems that allow them speeds of 50 Mbps or more.

Tim Johnson, senior analyst at Point Topic, commented: "Over 800,000 workplaces will be in the market for more bandwidth".

He added that 45 per cent of UK premises "expect to want more speed within the next two to three years".

A further seven per cent said that they would be looking to get "significantly more" speed than this.

Currently, the most common speed in UK places of work is 8Mbps, which is found in 33 per cent of premises.

Mr Johnson stated: "Remote access, remote helpdesks, video conferencing and VoIP are all becoming more embedded in day to day organisational use. These applications are the primary drivers for the increasing speeds."

While the proportion of businesses with faster speeds has increased, the number of companies who connect at less than 2Mbps has remained approximately the same.

In related news, Virgin Media was recently found to be the fastest UK broadband provider in the month of September, according to broadband.co.uk.

Its 6.128Mbps average download speed beat second-placed O2 and Be's 5.321Mbps, although the latter had the fastest upload speeds.

However, it should be noted that all these companies have top speed packages which may have tipped the results in their favour.


Wednesday, 8th October 2008

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