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The 2020 vs 2019 Top Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs

Tuesday, Dec 29th, 2020 (12:01 am) - Score 10,824
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On this page we take a quick look at how some of the more established altnet Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) providers – those that have built their own physically separate networks – perform when compared with the mainstream national ISPs. Sadly, most altnets only have comparatively niche coverage and limited speedtest data, which means that we’re only able to summarise a few of them.

Since these “full fibre” ISPs don’t suffer from the same performance pitfalls as copper or hybrid fibre networks then we tend to only focus our results on the top 10% of fastest connections, which in most cases will reflect those consumers who take the fastest package tiers available from each provider.

The caveat is that these scores will still be heavily affected by the same issues as mentioned earlier (e.g. slow Wi-Fi, local network congestion etc.). Some FTTP ISPs have also requested that we display the average speeds for only their fastest available package, but often there simply isn’t enough data for that to be viable and our purpose here is to examine general market change.

In an ideal world all providers would also publish their own internal speedtest data (i.e. to the customer’s router) for each of their packages, but they probably won’t do that unless forced by Ofcom (this would enable us to see how such connections perform when WiFi is taken out of the equation).

Full Fibre Altnets by Avg. Download (2020 vs 2019)

ISP DL – Top 10% (2020) DL – Top 10% (2019)
Community Fibre (FTTP) 639.2Mbps 448.9Mbps
Hyperoptic (FTTP) 453.9Mbps 284.9Mbps
Vodafone Gigafast (FTTP Only) 427.8Mbps 321.6Mbps
Gigaclear (FTTP) 225.5Mbps 321.4Mbps
KCOM (FTTP Only) 194.7Mbps 272Mbps

Obviously, such providers are anything but slow and it’s probably not worth reading too much into speed fluctuations here as the faster you go, the more obvious the caveats of web-based speed testing and other factors (slow WiFi etc.) tend to become. Hopefully as more altnets surface and grow then we’ll be able to expand this table, but generally speaking most FTTP providers deliver excellent performance.

The Fastest Mobile Operators

Mobile speeds remain incredibly difficult to pin down due to the highly variable nature of the technology. Users of such services are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor, underground etc.), using different devices with different capabilities and the environment around them (weather, trees, buildings etc.) is ever changeable. All of this impacts your signal and that’s before we even consider network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum ownership.

Suffice to say that studies of mobile broadband performance should always be considered open to variation, yet the top networks often tend to be those with a combination of the best 4G or 5G coverage, a good amount of radio spectrum and the most advanced technology.

Over the past 12 months we’ve also see the coverage of ultrafast 5G technology increase, albeit not as fast as hoped due to COVID-19, the Huawei ban and adoption among consumers being low. Nevertheless, 5G’s influence will continue to grow, particularly once Ofcom auctions off more radio bands (this process has also suffered significant delays).

Average Mobile Download Speeds

No. Operator 2020 (Top 10%) 2019 (Top 10%) Change
1. EE 39Mbps (80.1Mbps) 32.5Mbps (70.7Mbps) +20%
2. Three UK 27.5Mbps (56.7Mbps) 18.6Mbps (43Mbps) +47.85%
3. Vodafone 27.1Mbps (59.8Mbps) 26.5Mbps (60.7Mbps) +2.26%
4. O2 17.4Mbps (44.2Mbps) 16.9Mbps (38.4Mbps) +2.96%

Average Mobile Upload Speeds

No. Operator 2020 (Top 10%) 2019 (Top 10%) Change
1. EE 8.3Mbps (18.5Mbps) 7.6Mbps (17.9Mbps) +9.21%
2. Vodafone 6.3Mbps (16.3Mbps) 6.5Mbps (16.4Mbps) -3.08%
3. Three UK 6.1Mbps (16.1Mbps) 5.5Mbps (15.2Mbps) +10.91%
4. O2 4.4Mbps (12.6Mbps) 4.4Mbps (11.4Mbps) 0%

Overall, the average download speed of the four primary mobile operators was 27.75Mbps (up from 23.62Mbps at the end of 2019) and the average upload speed hit 6.27Mbps (up from 6Mbps).

The main change this time around is that Three UK has pulled ahead of Vodafone for download performance with a significant speed increase of 47.85% over the past year, which may be partly due to all the 5G spectrum they have available and recent capacity upgrades. But we’ll have to see if they can maintain this position with our next biannual update in 2021.

Ofcom are also due to auction off additional 5G friendly spectrum in early 2021, which may yet change the above order. Otherwise, it’s a little disappointing to see that O2 and Vodafone have struggled to improve, although other surveys tend to be more favourable to Vodafone.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 and .
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Comments
16 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Declan M says:

    Hi Mark quick question, Vodafone on FTTP is it Symmetrical ? Thanks.

    1. Avatar photo Leaf says:

      Yes and No. If you are in a City Fibre area you can get Symmetric but if you are in their trial area for Openreach it’s going to be Asymmetric.

    2. Avatar photo Declan M says:

      I thought so and I should have said city fibre areas cheers

  2. Avatar photo Craig says:

    Is it time for me to leave Vodafone and join Smarty better download speeds…

    1. Avatar photo Pezza says:

      I just left them to move to Voxi, Vodafone’s own MVNO, this was because the download speeds on Voxi 4G are much better, but the downside is your signal can drop from their 4G service to EDGE which is just diabolical, with Smarty you get 3G or 4G, both work much better then EDGE, also with Smarty you get WiFi calling and Voice over LTE calling, add to that they are launching an app soon and a 5G service at some point and I’m already thinking of moving back! I may wait for their app to come out or 5G plans. But I rate Smarty for sure.

    2. Avatar photo Jack says:

      I wouldn’t for now at least another year. I have been on/off with the Three network for about 8 years occasionally getting a PAYG sim for projects and stuff and I can certainly say Three in the early days of 4G were ok but in the past 2/3years the network is diabolical! Why is because too much contention with the crazily low cost for high amounts of data has overloaded the backhaul and also to say the signal hasn’t been that great either.

      So what has that got to do with Smarty, well they run on Three and its pretty much a free for all trying to get any use data wise due to the contention minding that Three are also doing unlimited ’Home Broadband’ that takes up spectrum and backhaul on their 4G for cheaper than a VDSL line with a fixed provider. I was with Smarty from January to October just before they announced WiFi calling which probably would’ve solved my signal problem in the house but it isn’t good enough when your paying for a 30Gig plan each month and only using 4gigs as the speed and dire signal. I’m now with Vodafone 12Gb which is a-lot less but at least its more than useable and amazing signal indoors although this would vary depending on your home location.

    3. Avatar photo George says:

      I have Smarty right now and I love it. It has recently got so much better since they added VoLTE and WiFi Calling since it takes some strain off the network. I get 70 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up on my Galaxy A5 2017 on smarty so I think 30GB for £10 is a good deal. Use my link for 1 month free
      http://referme.to/IaLhAtp

  3. Avatar photo G Cot says:

    Given, as stated, customers may only be purchasing a lower speed product the data could be augmented to show the proportions of customers on each speed product. Further it would also be interesting to see what proportion of users were receiving within 10% of the speed quoted for the product they pay for, which may be a better indication of the ‘quality’ of that ISP

  4. Avatar photo Lee says:

    Meanwhile on three 4g I’m averaging 0.2 to 1 m/bits down in South London.
    Granted it is internet delivered over the air as opposed to through a wire but the technology should be the same with the mast and backhaul serving a particular area identical to the cabinet serving multiple fixed line connections.
    How can cabinets serve multiple users with no deterioration in speeds whereas masts can not.
    I know congestion is the problem because in the early hours in the morning i have seen speeds of 40 to 50 m//bits occasionally.

    1. Avatar photo Brian says:

      Its all down to the topology. Wired/cabled/fibre systems generally have more bandwidth throughout the system. With cabinets you have a fibre link to the cabinet, and then individual copper pairs to each subscriber, so the pinch point is the fibre link. With 4g, there is only limited bandwith that the operator owns, and this is used to connect all subscribers in that area, then there is the backhaul link.
      So 4g is more akin to all subscribers sharing the one copper pair, rather than separate links to the cabinet, so the primary link is the pinch point, rather than the backhaul (though can be sometimes a problem).

      Generally Three gives me 60Mbps down / 12Mbps up, seen peaks of 160Mbps down / 24Mbps up, lows of 8Mbps down / 12Mbps up. I find congestion affects download more than upload. Still better than 3Mbps/380Kbps ADSL

  5. Avatar photo MilesT says:

    The tables don’t show stats for reliability.

    In my area of North West London there is a lot of chatter on nextdoor website about repeated long lasting Virgin outages (and some for Sky also).

    I’m seriously thinking about getting a 4g backup router and PAYG data on EE or Three (retail or wholesale). Have managed short outages on Sky with mobile phone tethering but that isn’t ideal

    1. Avatar photo Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry says:

      In fact one could argue that speed can be orthagonal to reliability, inasmuch as you can reduce your SNR margin to squeeze out a few extra Mbps, at the risk of dropping offline.

      That said, it’s no coincidence that most providers offering high-level FTTP to people this year have done better than those that didn’t.

      Bit surprised that Zen went down, but perhaps some on its plans skipped to BT once it became available? Or maybe they’re using a new IP range for FTTP and it wasn’t included? (That one seems a bit far-fetched, but everyone’s been a bit preoccupied this year and mistakes happen.)

  6. Avatar photo Pezza says:

    Wow, so BT beats my ISP IDNET, and Three beats Vodafone! And I’ve recently moved from Smarty to Voxi.. hmm. Actually been thinking about wether to stay on IDNET or move to BT. At least with MVNO’s with no contracts it’s dead simple to move now a days. The difference with Three is unlike Vodafone they don’t use EDGE or 2G so you always get 3G or 4G, even if the 3G can be faster it’s much better then EDGE.

    1. Avatar photo George says:

      Little known, three DO actually have an EDGE network. Once in a while the MBNL (EE & 3) mast by my house breaks and EE completely breaks and Three’s EDGE kicks in. I have seen this by the E on my signal bar on my phone. I am on SMARTY.

  7. Avatar photo James Summerfield says:

    I have used Three’s unlimited data plans for several years and found the speed very good. On 4G I get some 60-80 Mbps download, 27-30 Mbps upload, with ping of some 40 ms. Virgin Mobile gives some 20 Mbps, 16 Mbps and 25 ms in comparison, both at New Milton. Reception on Vodafone (Virgin Mobile) is supposed to be excellent and indeed is very good, but their speed is average and sucks in comparison to Three. I have found Three provides faster speeds wherever I have lived and am skeptical of speed comparisons on websites. I would recommend trying more than one provider when choosing a mobile data plan.

Comments are closed

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