Comparison site Comparethemarket.com has posted a new study, which they claim shows the top 10 best and worst Areas in England for gamers. Overall Hull comes top due to its speed of 137Mbps and a 99% availability of “superfast broadband“, while Central Devon sits bottom on 34Mbps and 77%. But key details have been overlooked.
Naturally broadband speed and the availability of faster networks are a vitally important consideration for anybody looking at new ISP options or locations for a new home, but the actual act of multiplayer gaming itself is dependent upon various other key factors that, oddly, aren’t even considered by the new study.
NOTE: “Superfast” isn’t defined in the study but it usually means downloads of 24-30Mbps+. Likewise “decent broadband” isn’t defined, but it usually means 10Mbps+.
“Bad broadband connectivity is a gamer’s worst nightmare. If you find yourself constantly freezing, repeatedly moving over the same area, or being kicked out of the game entirely, it ruins the whole experience. We crunched the data to find the areas in England that have the best and worst broadband, based on the average speed (Mbps), superfast availability, and the percentage of the area’s population unable to receive decent broadband,” said the study.
Sadly the comparison site fails to identify the source of their data, although we suspect they’re using Ofcom’s publicly available statistics (Connected Nations) and giving it a slightly different twist from the study they published in April 2020 (here). The result thus came out as follows.
Top 10 Worst Areas for Games
| Rank | Area | Average speed (Mbps) | Superfast availability | Unable to receive decent broadband |
| 1 | Central Devon | 34.05 | 77% | 12% |
| 2 | Torridge and West Devon | 34.01 | 81% | 12% |
| 3 | Forest of Dean | 31.61 | 79% | 10% |
| 4 | Ludlow | 33.09 | 81% | 11% |
| 5 | Penrith and The Border | 36.01 | 81% | 12% |
| 6 | North Herefordshire | 35.09 | 80% | 9% |
| 7 | Tiverton and Honiton | 31.89 | 81% | 9% |
| 8 | Harwich and North Essex | 37.06 | 83% | 9% |
| 9 | Somerton and Frome | 42.75 | 82% | 10% |
| 10 | Cities of London and Westminster | 34.41 | 75% | 0% |
Top 10 Best Areas for Gamers
| Rank | Area | Average speed (Mbps) | Superfast availability | Unable to receive decent broadband |
| 1 | Kingston upon Hull East | 137.44 | 99% | 1% |
| 2 | Kingston upon Hull North | 132.15 | 100% | 1% |
| 3 | Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle | 122.24 | 99% | 2% |
| 4 | Crawley | 88.40 | 99% | 0% |
| 5 | Filton and Bradley Stoke | 93.49 | 98% | 1% |
| 6 | Luton North | 84.10 | 100% | 0% |
| 7 | Morecambe and Lunesdale | 87.70 | 99% | 0% |
| 8 | Great Grimsby | 89.56 | 98% | 1% |
| 9 | Stevenage | 86.93 | 99% | 0% |
| 10 | Gillingham and Rainham | 86.61 | 99% | 0% |
At issue here is the fact the multiplayer gaming itself is actually a very low bandwidth service because the netcode and data packets need to be as lightweight as possible in order to deliver the smoothest performance. Certainly having a fast download speed is a big help with receiving the latest software updates, but the gameplay side tends to be more dependent upon factors such as latency, packet loss / jitter and upload speed.
As such it’s perfectly possible to play even many modern multiplayer games, provided the software is already on your device and up-to-date, using even an old copper ADSL broadband line (heck even ancient ISDN would probably be fairly smooth, thanks to its fast latency response). Admittedly having a minimum upload speed of 1Mbps is wise but they’ll often work with a fair bit less.
At the end of the day your latency (ping times) depend most of all on the capabilities and stability of the physical connection technology itself (e.g. ADSL, FTTP, FTTC), as well as remote server performance (e.g. the server for the game you’re connecting to) and your own local network setup. A good routing / peering arrangement at your ISP also helps (i.e. fewer server hops) and so does maintaining an uncongested network.
The real problem here is that doing an accurate comparison of such factors between different ISPs and areas would be incredibly difficult and prone to a high degree of error (too many different factors involved). But suffice to say, multiplayer gaming performance is about more than just download speed.
