The Top 2019 vs 2018 Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs

Next we’re going to examine how some of the more established full fibre (FTTP) AltNet providers – those that have built their own physically separate networks – compare with the mainstream national ISPs. Sadly most altnets only have comparatively niche coverage and limited speedtest data, which means that at present we can only summarise some data from a few of them.

As FTTP providers don’t suffer from the same performance pitfalls as copper or hybrid fibre ISPs then this time we’ve decided to focus our results on only the top 10% of fastest connections, which in most cases will reflect those consumers who take the fastest package tiers available from each provider.

However the performance scores below will still be heavily affected by the same caveats as mentioned earlier (e.g. slow Wi-Fi, local network congestion, limits of the speedtester etc.). Some full fibre ISPs would like us to display the average speeds for only their fastest available package but there simply isn’t enough data for that on every ISP and our purpose here is to examine general market change.

Hopefully in the future Ofcom may require ISPs to publish more of their own internal speedtest data (i.e. to the customer’s router) for each of their packages in public, which would enable us to see how such connections perform when WiFi is taken out of the equation. However they probably won’t do that unless forced.

Full Fibre Altnets by Average Speed (2019 vs 2018)

Overall it’s clear from the results above that such providers are anything but slow and this gives us a handy glimpse of what the future will be like, once full fibre networks are universal. However it’s worth noting that the Top 10% (download) result from Virgin Media’s network, before 1Gbps has even become widely available, still came in at a respectable 193.8Mbps (although their upload was very weak).

The Fastest Mobile Operators

Accurately gauging performance on mobile networks remains an unrealistic expectation due to the highly variable nature of the technology. Users of such services are almost constantly moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor, underground etc.), using different devices with different capabilities and the environment around them (weather, trees, buildings etc.) is similarly changeable.

Suffice to say that studies of mobile broadband performance should be considered open to variation, although the top networks tend to be those with a combination of the best 4G coverage, a good amount of radio spectrum and the most advanced technology (e.g. LTE-Advanced and Carrier Aggregation for harnessing multiple spectrum bands).

At present EE continues to hold the top position for another year, which is partly due to them having the best geographic UK network coverage (aiming for 95% by the end of 2020) and plenty of 4G spectrum to fuel it. However this dynamic may start to change as the 5G rollout matures but it’s still early days for that technology.

Average Mobile Download Speeds

Average Mobile Upload Speeds

Overall the average download speed of the four primary mobile operators was 23.62Mbps (up from 21.4Mbps at the end of 2018) and the average upload speed hit 6Mbps (up from 4.85Mbps). We also note that Vodafone seems to be slowly catching up to EE for downstream performance (mostly due to rising 4G availability) and Three UK is now threatening to leapfrog O2.

We should point out that the current government has recently lent its support to a £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) agreement on mobile coverage (here), which aims to extend geographic 4G coverage to 95% by the end of 2025 (the Government will put £500m into this). Suffice to say that between this and the roll-out of 5G we’ll be interested to see how the results look at this time next year.

In any case we do not consider the above speedtest based data – either for mobile or fixed lines – to be a reliable barometer for individual users, but it can help to highlight general changes in the market. The ever expanding reach of faster networks and take-up means that we will continue to see a general upward curve as consumers upgrade to use ever faster services.