The 2021 vs 2020 Top Fastest UK Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs

On this page we’ll examine how some of the more established altnet Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) providers – those who have built their own physically separate networks – perform when compared with the mainstream national players.

As these providers 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 gigabit tier(s) available from each provider. The caveat is that these scores will still be heavily impacted by the same issues as mentioned earlier (e.g. slow Wi-Fi, local network congestion, take-up of 1Gbps products etc.).

Ideally all providers would also publish their own internal speedtest data for each of their packages (i.e. to the customer’s router), but that would be expensive for some and require more action from Ofcom. On the flip side, it would enable us to see how such services perform when WiFi is taken out of the equation.

Full Fibre Altnets by Avg. Download (2021 vs 2020)

At this point we’d suggest not reading too much into any speed fluctuations above because the faster you go, the more obvious the caveats of web-based speed testing and other factors become (slow WiFi etc.). On top of that some ISPs, such as B4RN and toob, only sell a 1Gbps package (i.e. they aren’t impacted by users on slower tiers) and may have fewer customers (i.e. lower confidence due to a smaller data sample). In short, apples-to-apples comparisons may be unwise.

Hopefully we’ll be able to expand this table as more providers grow their reach across the market. But generally, most providers are delivering excellent performance. Most of those with ‘no data‘ listed above for 2020 are new additions in this update.

The Fastest Mobile Operators

Mobile performance is difficult to examine because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor, underground etc.), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment (weather, trees, buildings etc.) is ever changeable. All of this can impact the wireless signal, and that’s before we even consider network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum ownership.

Suffice to say that studies of mobile broadband speed are inherently open to variation, but 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 technologies. In 2021 the biggest change has been the growing reach of 5G and supporting devices, which is starting to push performance up again after 4G seemed to stagnate.

Average Mobile Download Speeds

Average Mobile Upload Speeds

Overall, the average download speed of the four primary mobile operators was 28.92Mbps (up from 27.75Mbps at the end of 2020) and the average upload speed hit 6.42Mbps (up from 6.27Mbps).

At our last update, in June 2021, we noted that Three UK had managed to overtake EE as the mobile operator with the fastest download speeds (here) and they also showed the strongest biannual improvement – this isn’t shown above as our annual comparison with 2020 uses data from a year ago, rather than 6 months. But the good news today is that they’ve managed to hold the top spot, while EE seems to have fallen back.

Overall, we’re unsure why EE and Vodafone saw a decline in performance during 2021, since the gradual network capacity upgrades, addition of new spectrum bands and rollout of 5G should be producing a gradual upward curve for both operators. However, recent data from Opensignal does appear to support the wider picture of limited improvement (here), albeit with some differences.

We should point out that the new 5G networks are still somewhat hobbled by limited coverage, low adoption of supporting Smartphones and having to use some 4G spectrum and services, which won’t improve much until the new Standalone 5G (SA) networks start to gain some traction (these adopt 5G for everything, end-to-end). The latter is a big part of the reason why upload speeds (as well as latency) haven’t improved more.