The website for Halesworth, a Suffolk market town known for brewing and malting, boasts that it gives local people "the advantages of the new millennium, while secure in the roots of the past". When it comes to broadband, however, some residents are still stuck in the last century.

England's southern counties perform particularly badly, with West Sussex and Hampshire accounting for a quarter of the UK's 20 slowest locations. Faraday Avenue in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, may be named after the inventor of the electric motor, but it has the fourth worst broadband, with a speed of 0.182Mbps.

The average speed is 6.8Mbps, but not one street on the list has a speed over half a megabyte - the 50th is Bloomsfield in Burwell, Cambridge, with 0.454Mbps.

By comparison, residents of Britain's fastest town, Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, enjoy average speeds of nearly 19Mbps. They can download a song in two seconds and a full-length feature film takes five minutes.