Broadband Guide

16 Mb Broadband

Updated: Tuesday 04 January, 2011

By Editorial - news@consumerchoices.co.uk

Broadband connections in the UK are getting faster, and some ISPs are now offering download speeds of up to 16Mbps. The bandwidth your house can cope with will be determined by a few factors, such as the distance to your local BT exchange and the quality of the connection. If you’re looking for 16Mb broadband, here’s our guide to getting the most from your supplier.

Broadband services at this kind of speed are normally provided in a slightly different way to average-speed connections. They use a process called Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), where the company rents space in a BT exchange and connects its own network directly to BT’s. This means that ultra-high-speed services are only available to you if your property is near a BT exchange that has been ‘unbundled’ by your chosen supplier. Enter your postcode into our Broadband Checker to see whether this is the case. You’ll need a BT phone line to use LLU 16Mb broadband services.

Unfortunately, this means that 16Mb broadband is not yet available nationwide. Some of the larger ISPs are rolling out the service gradually, starting in London and other major cities before spreading their networks to less densely populated areas. To see what is available in your area, you can use our calculator to compare broadband.

In January 2006, there were 210,000 LLU lines in the UK and the number was growing rapidly. ISPs are lining up to migrate lines in bulk, and demand for superfast domestic broadband is still increasing. The Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator announced at the beginning of the year that it was expecting as many as 3million phone lines to be ‘unbundled’ in 2006.

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