Opensignal Compare European and UK Fixed Broadband Speeds UPDATE

Network benchmarking firm Opensignal has published a new study of fixed broadband speeds across 28 European countries, which reveals that the United Kingdom performs poorly against its peers – placing mid-table for downloads and toward the bottom for uploads.

The following results are based on crowdsourced data collected from consumer speedtests and are thus only good for observing general market change over time, which means they shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a reflection of either network capability or network availability. But the same caveats apply to all of the countries tested, and thus this sort of data still offers some useful insights.

Overall, France and Spain stand out with the best observed broadband speeds, scoring average (median) downloads of 121Mbps (Megabits per second) and 114.4Mbps, respectively. By comparison, the UK sits firmly mid-table on a score of 66.1Mbps, while Greece came last with just 36.5Mbps.

In terms of uploads, Spain topped the table with an average of 91.4Mbps, and they were followed by France on 88.5Mbps. By comparison, the UK can be found languishing in the bottom 20% of the table with a result of just 20.6Mbps. But spare a thought for the last place entry of Greece, which could only manage a paltry 7.3Mbps.

The results aren’t all that surprising when you consider that “full fibre” FTTP coverage and take-up will be playing a big part in these results, but the UK is currently playing catch-up with most of Europe in this respect. You can get more context for this by examining the EU’s latest broadband progress report (here) and the FTTH Council’s annual ranking (here). The good news is that the UK is rapidly catching up, but it will take time.

Suffice to say that performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story, although Opensignal are generally one of the better organisations at analysing such data.

UPDATE 16th October 2023

Opensignal has informed us that the study is based on fixed broadband connectivity, and they’ll shortly be uploading some additional methodology to confirm that.