nPerf Names Fastest UK Fixed Broadband ISPs by Nation in 2026 Study
France-based internet connection benchmarking firm nPerf has this morning published the results from their annual 2026 crowdsourced study into fixed broadband ISP speeds across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The results cover Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, Vodafone, TalkTalk, Fibrus (NI) and Ogi (Wales).
The latest nPerf studies (here, here, here and here) are based on masses of tests carried out – between January and December 2025 – exclusively by customers of the aforementioned internet providers – using tools on both nPerf’s website and via their dedicated mobile testing apps for Android and iOS. But we don’t get any hard stats on the sample sizes or structure.
However, the UK’s largest broadband provider – BT (inc. EE and Plusnet) – is nowhere to be found in any of the summaries. The company states that they “only include national internet service providers with a test share above 5%“, which suggests that BT somehow ended up, in every nation, with a very small sample of results and that seems implausible.
Advertisement
Suffice to say that we recommend taking these results, which we’ve summarised below, with a pinch of salt. Overall, Virgin Media scored the highest in England and Scotland, while Vodafone came top for Northern Ireland and Wales.
Advertisement
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« FullFibre and Zzoomm Complete Broadband Altnet UK ISP Brand Integration
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Meaningless even if EE was included given there’s no data on what the connection speed of each customer was. Plenty of people can get faster speeds if they buy a more expensive package.
And not forgetting this doesn’t account for the WiFi routers folks are running either.
All well and good taking 1.6Gbps products when most don’t own devices that’ll do it in a single stream.