UK Average Broadband Speeds in Q3 2015 Hit 13Mbps vs 5.1Mbps Globally

Akamai has released their latest State of the Internet Q3 2015 (SotI) report, which states that the world’s average fixed line broadband download speed is 5.1Mbps (unchanged from Q2), which compares with 13Mbps in the United Kingdom (up from 11.8Mbps). Elsewhere the UK’s overall country ranking has rebounded from 19th to 14th.

As usual the figures are all based on the performance of the firms global Content Delivery Network, which accounts for around 15-30% of all web traffic, although this doesn’t strictly reflect actual end-user connection speeds (it’s more a reflection of the CDN performance and its related connections to ISPs / end-users around the world).

Otherwise we note that after a period of stagnation the United Kingdom finally saw a rise in its Q3 results, which equates to a 10% quarterly improvement in our average broadband speeds (+20% for our overall year-on-year speeds). This represents a roughly average increase vs Europe, although Germany recorded a 32% rise in Q3 and could soon overtake the UK.

Similarly it’s important to point out that some of the fastest countries in the world may still, in the below tables, appear to deliver fairly pedestrian performance. This is because consumers often pick slower speed packages to save money, while network congestion or traffic management may also play a part and not everybody is connected to the fastest network available in their area.

Now let’s take a quick look at a summary of the top 10 fastest countries in the world. At this point it’s no surprise to find that the United Kingdom is absent from this first table as other countries, such as those with much more widely available pure fibre optic (FTTH/P) or cable networks, are easily able to beat us.

At this point we usually like to contrast the United Kingdom’s results with those for the wider Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, which shows that we’re still just ahead of the other major EU states (e.g. Germany, France, Spain and Italy), but trailing many of the smaller countries.

Akamai’s State of the Internet Q3 2015 Report
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/