Missing out on Cheltenham Festival tickets? Sheffield is one of the best places to stream Gold Cup

The Cheltenham Festival has come galloping around once again, with the action getting underway from Tuesday 12th March. With tickets for the event limited, plenty of sports fans up and down the country will be watching the races from the local pub.

However, this means that strong internet connection becomes an essential part of the day, as punters try to keep up with changing odds and updates on the winners.

Research carried out by The Winners Enclosure has compared the availability of 5G and the estimated mean maximum download speed on broadband/wi-fi across thirty-five of the most populated places in England.

Kingston-upon-Hull clinched top spot with a perfect connectivity score of 10/10. The Humberside city was found to have twelve different networks offering 5G internet connection, and also boasted the fastest estimated download speed of any major city in England at 938 Mbps (Megabits per second).

Birkenhead earned second place and a total connectivity score of 9.7 out of 10. The Merseyside town is also blessed with twelve different 5G networks, and the download speed is not too bad around Birkenhead either at 889 Mbps.

Leeds ranked third with a total score of 9.4. Like each of the locations to place in the top 10, there are also twelve different networks providing 5G in the Leeds area. However, Leeds was also found to have a super speedy estimated download speed of 850 Mbps - making streaming the Cheltenham Festival and more a real doddle.

In fourth place was Bristol, with a total score of 9.1. Again, Bristol has access to twelve different 5G providers, but the city also benefits from an estimated download speed of 831 Mbps, meaning better broadband for your buck in Bristol.

Completing the top five was Sheffield, which like fellow Yorkshire cities Hull and Leeds has access to twelve different 5G providers. Sheffield’s estimated download speed was found to be an especially strong 815 Mbps.

Elsewhere, the likes of Newcastle, York, Portsmouth, Manchester and Liverpool all featured within the top ten best cities to stream the Cheltenham Festival.

Some of the worst performing locations included Wigan, Preston and Farnborough. Wigan had the lowest estimated download speed (655 Mbps) of any of the thirty-five places tested in this study. Meanwhile, in Preston, only two networks were found to offer stable 5G internet connection.

Alex Beecham, Managing Director at The Winners Enclosure, said, “The way that fans engage with and access sports is forever being changed, shaped and most of the time improved by the internet. The ability to access a wealth of information at the click of a button helps fans to form a better understanding of the sport, and in turn a stronger emotional connection with it too.

He continued, “Nowadays, fans can continue to engage with live sports while they are in-play, making strong internet connection a must for the modern-day sports fan. Even delays as miniscule as a couple of seconds can prove detrimental to a fan's overall experience of live sporting events.”