2020 vs 2019 – UK Broadband and Mobile Speeds vs the World

We thought it might be interesting to end 2020 by looking at how the United Kingdom’s position has changed since 2019, at least in terms of the top 50 fastest countries for both fixed broadband and mobile broadband (4G, 5G) speeds. Overall the UK jumped from 52nd to 42nd for mobile, while we fell from 45th to 47th for fixed lines.

In order to create this report we made sure to keep track of the publicly available data released by Ookla, which runs the popular Speedtest.net service for testing internet connection performance. We should caveat that, in our experience, Ookla’s performance data has tended to weight more toward the optimistic side, but for the purpose of this article that same issue isn’t such a concern as it applies to every country in the table.

As usual the main differentiator for performance between countries tends to reflect a balance between the availability and take-up of faster connection types. For example, countries with a significant availability of “gigabit-capable” fixed broadband networks (e.g. full fibre FTTP and DOCSIS 3.1 cable) or strong 4G and 5G mobile availability (ideally with lots of spectrum) will usually rank highest in the table.

The United Kingdom has significantly improved its broadband and mobile infrastructure over the past decade, but such change is just as true in other countries and, judging by the results, it appears as if our development has struggled a bit to keep pace. In particular the UK was late to begin truly large-scale Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) deployments, which has left us trailing much of the EU, as well as other countries (here).

Despite those setbacks it’s worth noting that the UK is now making rapid progress on “full fibre” delivery (here and here) and we recently became one of the earliest adopters of ultrafast 5G technology. Lest we also forget that Virgin Media’s upgrade to 1Gbps capable DOCSIS 3.1 will make such speeds available to around half of the UK by the end of 2021. So we might be late to the gigabit party, but things are getting better.

The Top Fastest 50 Countries for Broadband

At the end of 2019 we recorded that the average global fixed download speed was 71.55Mbps (38.91Mbps upload), while the average global mobile download speed was 30.93Mbps (11.88Mbps upload). At that time the UK ranked 45th for fixed broadband (63.65Mbps down and 18.75Mbps up) and just 52nd for mobile (34.14Mbps down and 11.56Mbps up).

By comparison, at the same time in 2020, we recorded that the average global fixed download speed was 87.84Mbps (47.16Mbps upload), while the average global mobile download speed was 39.18Mbps (11.63Mbps upload). Meanwhile the UK ranked 47th for fixed broadband (76.49Mbps down and 22.88Mbps up) and 42nd for mobile (41.72Mbps down and 10.44Mbps up).

Overall the UK’s ranking has improved for mobile, which may be partly due to our early adoption of 5G networks (we weren’t even in the top 50 last year), but sadly we’ve fallen back a few places for fixed broadband performance because other countries have improved their position at a faster pace.

We should add that the average global latency on fixed broadband lines in 2020 was 21ms (same in UK) and 38ms on mobile (42ms in UK) – lower figures for this are faster. The following tables show how the countries compare, using only download speed as the key measure, across the top 50 countries.

Fastest 50 Countries for Fixed Broadband Speed (DL)

Fastest 50 Countries for Mobile Broadband Speed (DL)