BT has come top in a trial of consumer broadband products, according to a customer experience monitoring firm. 

A survey by Epitiro of 10 of the UK's largest ADSL providers accessed the services from 10 geographic locations between April and June 2006. 

However, services from cable companies NTL and Telewest were not included in the tests because they use different technology.

"Our consumer ADSL testing found that, in terms of internet performance, BT topped the overall rankings for the period April to June 2006," said Gavin Johns, managing director at Epitiro.

"BT was also found to provide the fastest service as a percentage of its theoretical maximum."

The study found that Virgin, BT and AOL were the fastest services to actually connect to the internet, while Pipex, Orange and BT were up to four times faster than the industry average at delivering email. 

Epitiro's Internet Performance Index ranks companies based on performance, with a company that was top in every test having a perfect score of 1.0.

BT led the group with a score of 2.78, Virgin took second with 4.79, Demon had 5.0, AOL scored 5.22 and Orange was close behind with 5.23.

The findings were based on the speed of internet connections, how long it takes to connect, POP and SMTP email performance, file upload and download speeds, and PING and DNS lookup.

The ADSL services failed to connect in 12,503 instances out of 948,411 attempts over the second-quarter period, representing an average failure rate of 1.93 per cent.