What’s the difference between superfast, ultrafast and gigabit speeds?
Over the years, broadband speeds have been described by some slightly confusing terms. How much faster is ‘ultrafast’ than ‘superfast’? And why is ‘superfast’ used to describe some of the slowest speeds?
We'll explain the difference.
Superfast broadband
Despite what the name suggests, ‘superfast’ technically means a standard broadband speed that returns between 30-70Mbps (megabits per second).
This speed is mainly attached to part-fibre broadband packages. When these connections started to roll out in the early 2010s, they were labelled ‘superfast’ because, at the time, they were the fastest connections a typical household could get. They offered a big speed boost to full-copper (ADSL) broadband, which could only return average speeds of about 10Mbps.
But with ultrafast broadband options now available to over three-quarters of the UK, these speeds are now being dwarfed by what newer types of broadband can offer.
Ultrafast broadband
‘Ultrafast’ means a broadband speed between 100 and 900Mbps. Ofcom states that it starts from 300Mbps, but we use 100Mbps as the marker because it’s easier to show which types of broadband can achieve these speeds.
Around the same time as the superfast broadband rollout, Virgin Media became the first provider to offer an ultrafast service of 100Mbps and above—thanks to its faster ‘coaxial’ cable, which needed to be installed at each customer’s property.
But in recent years, other providers started to compete with Virgin’s speeds, offering full fibre connections that connect fibre-optic cables into UK residents’ homes and speeds even beyond that we call 'ultrafast'.
5G broadband also started to roll out at this time, providing ultrafast speeds up to 300Mbps for specific urban areas of the UK.
Gigabit broadband
'Gigabit’ often refers to speeds of above 900Mbps, but it officially relates to 1Gbps (gigabits per second). Once a speed reading hits 1000Mbps, it changes from megabits to gigabits, just like how a 1000MB file size is the same as 1GB.
Learn more about the difference with our bits and bytes explained guide.
Gigabit is the fastest broadband speed range that most homes can currently get. 83% of UK homes can achieve these broadband speeds, which means the country will likely far exceed the 85% target by the end of 2025, which was set out a few years ago.