UK and EU Mobile Broadband Speeds Fall While Roaming Q1 2018

Ookla has published a new table, which reveals how much your Mobile Broadband (3G / 4G) speeds could drop within the EU when you roam outside of your home country. For example, the average local mobile download speed in the UK is 26.16Mbps but this drops by -19.4% (21.08Mbps) when roaming.

Overall the mean (average) download speed in the EU when customers are at home is 30.57Mbps (Megabits per second), but that slows by -16.6% to 25.50Mbps when Europeans roam across a border. Sadly we don’t get a country-split for each of the ranked states but it’s still an interesting table.

The results aren’t all negative either, with Italians enjoying a +15.4% increase in download speeds when travelling abroad (Estonians, Latvians and the Portuguese also saw faster downloads abroad). As usual Ookla’s results stem from their popular Speedtest.net service, which is used by millions of people across the world.

Various reasons may exist for all these changes, such the technological differences between networks in other countries (both the network and radio spectrum bands), as well as alternative traffic management measures and perhaps also the fact that general data usage has surged since free roaming was introduced (example). Some performance drops may also be intentional, such as when balancing network load etc.

At present mobile roaming is still free for those of us in the United Kingdom, although it’s starting to look increasingly likely that the EU’s “Roam Like At Home” rules will cease to apply here once the Brexit process completes. Some operators, such as Three UK, have vowed to continue it regardless of Brexit but only time will tell whether or not they can hold to that pledge.