Despite the fact that broadband speeds are at the highest level ever, slow connections came out as the biggest cause of broadband rage, troubling 40 per cent of broadband users.

According to customers, that’s down to inaccurate advertising by internet service providers, which promise up to 8Mbps - a speed that Broadband Genie said is rarely achieved by the average home user.

The next biggest annoyance for those surveyed was customer service.

Just over a third of broadband users said they experienced poor quality of service and support, especially when it came to spending lengthy periods of time on customer support phone lines.

Aside from those two main concerns, most of the other hassle was eaten up with faults.

An unlucky 13 per cent of broadband customers in the study cited sporadic faults or disconnections.

Amazingly, none of the broadband users questioned felt that they were getting a raw deal with the price of their package and only three per cent were worried about caps being put on how much they could download.

Ciaron Dunne, a spokesman at Broadband Genie, said it was interesting that very few customers were annoyed by price or capped downloads.

“It seems that if ISPs deliver their advertised service without exceptions, customers will quite happily pay the price,” he said.

“The trouble starts when the goods, or in this case speed, isn’t delivered.”

Broadband Genie conducted a survey of 210 broadband subscribers to create the study.