BRITAIN'S slowest broadband speeds continue to be found in market towns and rural areas, confirms a report.

The slowest street for broadband is Cromarty Road in Stamford, Lincolnshire, claims the price comparison website uSwitch.

With a barely-there average download speed of just 0.132Mbps, Cromarty Road is more than 500 times slower than the UK's fastest street, which is Willowfield in Telford (70.9Mbps).

Willowfield residents would take just 2 minutes 49 seconds to download a two-hour film, while Cromarty Road residents would take a dawdling 25 hours and 15 minutes.

With an average download speed of just 0.192Mbps, the second slowest street is Ledbury Road in Wellington Heath, Herefordshire.

Residents on Ledbury Road would probably be better off sending snail mail than an email, said uSwitch. "Their street is a broadband dead end," it added.

The 50 slowest places for broadband are listed below.

Julia Stent, broadband expert at uSwitch.com, said: "Rural parts of Britain in particular are still experiencing broadband speeds so slow that they might as well have no broadband at all."

The massive discrepancy between the fastest and slowest streets showed what the government was up against in its fight to drag Britain into the broadband fast-lane, she added.

"Worryingly, the government's super-fast broadband rollout is heavily geared towards urban areas, which will only widen the rural-urban broadband gap."

Ms Stent said it was worrying that that the governent's main aim wasn't providing a decent broadband service to those areas still lacking basic broadband infrastructure.

The government should be bringing acceptable average speeds to those in rural areas who had been forever languishing in the slow lane, she suggested.

"While the government also has ambitions of bringing basic broadband to all – this only means speeds of 2 Mbps, and no targets have been set."

Most of Britain's slowest streets for broadband were not in particularly remote areas, but in small towns, nearer to exchanges and where higher download speeds would be expected.

"Part of the problem is that government funding for super-fast broadband is being dished out to councils, who don't necessarily have a full view of the big picture."