The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

Ofcom even provides a graph (shown below, click to enlarge) that reveals how little upload speeds improve for people on those premium, high-speed connections:

Does this really matter? If you’ve ever tried using an online service to back-up your PC, you’ll know it’s probably quicker to copy the files to a hard disk and drive it to the company. In fact, Amazon’s online backup service suggests you do exactly that.

Thankfully, there are signs of improvement on the horizon. BT says the 40Mbits/sec fibre lines it’s rolling out at the moment will have two tiers of upload speed: 5 and 10Mbits/sec. The company claims it might even be able to squeeze 15Mbits/sec uploads out of the fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology. That’s potentially ten times as fast as Virgin Media’s 50Mbits/sec service, which only offers upload speeds of 1.5Mbtis/sec.

It’s been quite a while since BT could claim it was ten times as fast as Virgin…