Watching television online can be frustrating. The video often skips and for no obvious reason can stop working altogether. So for many, settling on the sofa to watch Doctor Who or Match of the Day on a computer screen would be difficult, as so much time would be spent getting up again to work out what the problem was.

Now that all BBC shows will be available online some viewers might consider turning their furniture away from the TV and towards the PC. If so, they should not worry about upgrading their computers, as a smooth watching experience on a PC has less to do with how flashy your hard drive is and more to do with the quality of your broadband connection.

There are some basics that your computer will require to watch TV online. It must run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux, but as almost 99 per cent of computers do so, that should not be a problem. A user must also have Flash Player, which helps to run video. It can be downloaded free.

Broadband speeds are crucial, and they vary across the country and from home to home. To run iPlayer, the BBC’s video-on-demand service, the corporation advises a connection speed of 1 megabit per second (Mbs) “for best enjoyment”. However, iPlayer, which is archived TV, allows you to download a programme and then watch it. For live TV streamed on the internet you need a constant high speed. If your speed dips too low, which can be caused by several people using the same home connection, the image will stutter.

Ofcom said: “Most people are able to watch TV over the internet on their existing broadband speeds – no need for new equipment.”

However, Broadband.co.uk, a website that offers advice on internet connections, suggests that to replicate TV quality video, a user requires a speed of 8Mbs.

To put that into perspective, if downloading a song takes more than a few seconds, your connection is probably not fast enough. Industry insiders suggest that users may even require a faster connection than that for a completely smooth picture.

Britain’s broadband infrastructure is not close to supporting those needs and there is often a big difference between advertised and actual internet speeds. Some suppliers say that they can provide up to 20Mbs, but few actually achieve that. Your connection speed can also be something of a postcode lottery. The farther your home is from a telephone exchange, the slower the speed. An 8Mbs connection can be as slow as 512 kilobits per second if you are five miles from an exchange. Ofcom placed the average broadband speed at 5.9Mbs. But another recent test suggested that the true figure was closer to 3Mbs.

Upgrading the country from copper wires to super-fast fibreoptic lines will cost as much as £29 billion, according to a recent report. The Government is looking at how to make the transition. BT already aims to speed up connections to some homes to 40Mbs. Virgin has a top speed of 20Mbs, and aims to increase that to 50Mbs by the end of the year.

European and global average speeds are not better than those in Britain. You have to travel to Japan and South Korea before you find the kind of super-fast broadband that would make watching EastEnders online hassle-free.

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