Q3 2018 Map of UK and Europe Ranked by Mobile Broadband Speed

RFBenchmark has published its latest crowd-sourced study into Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) speed across Europe, which reveals that the United Kingdom delivered an average download rate of 17.7Mbps (up from 16.9Mbps last year), uploads of 9.03Mbps (up from 7.85Mbps) and latency of 77ms (better than 101ms).

The data was gathered by analysing tests conducted via users of the RFBenchmark mobile application. We should caution that gathering data in this way, via lots of different Smartphones, can easily become subject to the differences / limits of end-user hardware, as well as general variations in local 3G / 4G coverage and network capacity etc. Similar reports from OpenSignal are also worth checking out (here and here).

Overall the results suggest that most countries seem to be on about the same sort of performance level as the United Kingdom for mobile download speed (give or take a few Megabits), although Eastern Europe seems to struggle a lot more for good latency (lower is better) and upload speed.

France ultimately delivered the fastest average mobile broadband speeds of 20.8Mbps (Megabits per second), while the Netherlands came top for uploads on 10.7Mbps and the best country for low latency (ping) times was Lithuania on 54ms (milliseconds). We’ve posted a general summary of the latest results below.

Europe – the highest average data download speed:

France: 20.8 Mbps
Austria 20.4 Mbps
Portugal: 19.7 Mbps

Europe – the lowest average data download speed:

Ukraine: 5.64 Mbps
Macedonia: 8.2 Mbps
Belarus: 10.1 Mbps
Ireland: 10.1 Mbps

Europe – the highest average data upload speed:

The Netherlands: 10.7 Mbps
Austria: 10.5 Mbps
Spain: 10.1 Mbps

Europe – the lowest average data upload speed:

Macedonia: 2.3 Mbps
Montenegro: 2.8 Mbps
Ukraine: 2.89 Mbps

Europe – the lowest (best) ping value:

Lithuania: 54 ms
Finland: 56 ms
Norway: 59 ms

Europe – the highest (worst) ping value:

Ukraine: 117 ms
Russia: 115 ms
Slovakia: 113 ms