How to Get the Fastest Broadband - An Unhelpful Guide

When it comes to getting the fastest broadband the advice, if it is useful, is usually wrong.

There are plenty of practical things you can do to speed up your broadband connection at home. To make it, in a word, faster.

However, there are rather fewer things you can do to get the fastest broadband without doing things that are rather less useful and rather more of a complete pain in the proverbial.

So here they all are: all three things you can do to get the fastest broadband deals - not, as we have already seen rather pedantically, to be confused with faster broadband.

First, in our countdown of unhelpful advice is this: move house, probably very far away.

By this we don't mean get some 15GB Mobile Broadband and swan about feeling smug and connected to the internet wherever you can actually pick up a connection.

No. We mean - up sticks, your home, your family, your job - and move somewhere where the internet service providers, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to lay down the latest broadband cables.

These will be fibre optic cables of good quality and will come directly into your home. This is known as FFTH (fibre to the home) broadband.

Unfortunately, almost all of the fibre in the UK is FTTC which is at least half as fast as FTTH broadband, if not more.

Countries such as South Korea and parts of Japan have FTTH broadband installed so your best bet is probably to move over there. We told you it was a unhelpful guide.

The exception within the UK is a new estate in Ashford, Kent which is apparently having the cables installed in the next few years or so.

You could move there for the UK's fastest broadband, though by that time we expect that it'll no longer be the fastest broadband per se.

The second point to note is that to get the fastest broadband it'll really be best for your new house to be more or less completely isolated.

This is tricky because, given that the fastest broadband technology tends to be installed in cities where it can benefit the greatest number of people.

However, one of the main things that can slow down a home broadband connection is having a number of people using the service at once - which is why it gets slower at peak times - so you'll want to avoid that too.

Julia Cook is a staff writer for a site that helps users to compare broadband deals within the UK market. The site also helps users with general queries such as how to get sky sports.