UK Struggles in Ranking of World’s Fastest Cities for Broadband

Internet connectivity benchmarking firm Ookla, which maintains the popular Speedtest.net service, has updated their ranking of broadband performance in countries around the world to include internet speed rankings for some of the “world’s largest cities“. But London and Manchester in the UK appear nowhere near the top.

Take note that speedtest based studies can be affected by all sorts of issues, such as slow home WiFi, limitations of the tester itself, local network congestion, smartphone capabilities and package choice (e.g. a lot of people will pick a slower and cheaper plan, even with 1Gbps available). Suffice to say that such studies should not be taken as a reflection of actual network availability, although every location shares the same sort of caveats.

Ookla’s new list ranks median internet download speeds in nearly 200 cities all over the world. Overall, China topped the list with Shanghai as the fastest city on their list for mobile broadband with a median download speed of 158.63Mbps (24.32Mbps upload and 17ms latency), while Beijing was fastest for fixed broadband during September 2022 at 238.86Mbps (37.75Mbps upload and 7ms latency).

In terms of the United Kingdom, both London and Manchester made it into the table, but you have to scroll quite far down to see them. For mobile broadband connectivity, Manchester ranked highest on 39th (67.07Mbps down, 8.53Mbps up and 37ms latency) and London ranked directly below on 40th (66.36Mbps down, 8.74Mbps up, 28ms latency).

As for fixed line broadband, London is ranked just 71st in the world (73.93Mbps down, 18.77Mbps up, 10ms latency) and Manchester could be found wallowing a little further down in 75th position (73.43Mbps down, 19.16Mbps up, 12ms latency).

Fastest Broadband Speeds for the World’s Largest Cities 2022