Map of UK and Europe Ranked by Mobile Broadband Speed – 2020
RFBenchmark has just published their annual crowd-sourced study of Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G, 5G) speed across Europe, which reveals that the United Kingdom delivered an average download rate of 17.6Mbps (up from 17.2Mbps last year), uploads of 8.7Mbps (up from 8.54Mbps) and latency of 62ms (improved from 71ms).
The data is typically 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 mobile coverage and network capacity etc. Similar reports from Opensignal are also worth checking out (here).
Overall the results suggest that most countries seem to be on about the same or a better performance level to the United Kingdom for mobile download speed (give or take a few Megabits), while Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine etc.) struggles a lot more for good latency (a lower figure is better) and mobile internet connectivity speeds.
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Meanwhile France continued to deliver the fastest mobile download speeds (19.9Mbps), while Spain achieved the fastest uploads (10.3Mbps) and the fastest network latency (ping) times – measured in milliseconds (i.e. a lower figure is better) – could be found in Latvia (59ms). By comparison Ukraine came bottom in all of those categories, although their country has suffered from a significant conflict with Russia over the past few years.
Mobile Download Speeds Across Europe (Q4 2019)
Europe – the highest average data download speed:
France: 20.3 Mbps
Austria 19.4 Mbps
Portugal: 18.9 MbpsEurope – the lowest average data download speed:
Ukraine: 5.9 Mbps
Macedonia: 8.6 Mbps
Belarus: 10.2 MbpsEurope – the highest average data upload speed:
Spain: 9.9 Mbps
Austria: 9.87 Mbps
The Netherlands: 9.84 Mbps
Belgium: 9.84 MbpsEurope – the lowest average data upload speed:
Ukraine: 2.58 Mbps
Macedonia: 2.6 Mbps
Montenegro: 2.9 MbpsEurope – the lowest PING value (best performance):
Latviaithuania: 58 ms
Estonia: 61 ms
Finland: 62 ms
Norway: 62 msEurope – the highest PING value (slowest performance):
Ukraine: 107 ms
Russia: 104 ms
Georgia: 99 ms
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.
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I should install the app. I’m lucky to get a signal with any provider a couple of miles from Southampton. I’d bring the UK stats down a little more…
Don’t worry, 5G will be installed across the UK and by the time you ‘may’ be very lucky to get it in the area 6G will have started.. because it’s more important to increase speeds then coverage and signal strength in the UK, apparently.
Such an interesting new country Latviaithuania 🙂
Macedonia is not a country
Spot the Greek 🙂
Yes it’s known as North Macedonia now but it will take a while for the world to catch up.