BT said it before and most probably will say it again - it has been slowing down speeds at peak times in order for all customers to get the same service.

However a report in the New York Times found just how many connections it was slowing down, calculating a whole of three quarters.

The findings were based on the results produced by a tool which was put together by the Germany-based Max Planck Institute, according to which UK was leading the way in terms of throttling.

Make no mistake, throttling was happening all over the world, at a rate of 32 per cent to be exact, however this was much higher in the UK.

Slowing down "exceeded 50 per cent for six other British operators: NTL, Opal Telecom, Telewest Broadband, Carphone Warehouse Broadband Service, Tiscali UK and Pipex" while "slowing was detected on 74 per cent of tests done on BT's British regional network", the report stated.

Keen broadband news followers might notice that some names appear to be outdated, so thought BT when it stated:

"This seems to be an extremely old survey as many of the companies highlighted have not been in existence for a number of years."

However PCPro reported Krishna Grummadi, head of the programme at the Max Planck Institute, saying that:

"Sometimes these ISPs are acquired by other ISPs or they decide to change their names and rebrand themselves, without necessarily changing the domain name registration of the IP address."

That meant that the results were not at all outdated: "that does not have any implication on the date of the results, which were all gathered in 2011," Grummadi summarised.