IT is the former coal mining village that was home for Elaine C Smith and former Scotland football captain Gary McAllister.
Now Newarthill in North Lanarkshire has a place in the record books as having a street with the fastest broadband speeds in the UK, at least according to one speed test study.
Benford Avenue tops the list of five Scottish streets which are amongst the 30 with the fastest broadband speeds.
Residents there have access to gold standard Virgin fibre-to-the-router superfast broadband which can provide speeds of up to 300mbps. They were getting an average of 177mbps – m ore than 260 times faster than the slowest in the UK, Thorpe Lane, Trimley St Martin in Suffolk with a “dire” 0.68mbps.
It comes less than a week after the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives argued over the availability of broadband in Scotland.
On Thorpe Lane it would take over 21 hours to download a two-hour HD film on Netflix and nearly eight hours to download a 45-minute HD TV show. By contrast, on Benford Avenue, it would take less than five minutes to download a two-hour HD film and 109 seconds to download a 45-minute HD TV show.
A second Motherwell street, Airbles Crescent, which also has access to Virgin’s superfast services, was ninth fastest averaging 141.344mbps.
Three other Scottish streets were in the top 30 of the fastest speeds in the UK, Kingsdyke Avenue, Glasgow (132.797mbps), Simshill Road, Glasgow (129.386mbps) and Mauchline Court, Hamilton (125.773mbps).
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