The 2023 vs 2022 Top Fastest UK Mobile and Broadband ISPs

We’re today taking a quick look back over 2023 to see how the average UK broadband download and upload speeds have changed across the fastest nationally available fixed line, satellite and mobile network operators. As usual, improvements in FTTP and 5G coverage are continuing to fuel performance gains.

The result below stem from web-based speed testing by consumers and are thus inevitably impacted by a number of factors, such as the rising coverage of faster networks (e.g. full fibre, 4G and 5G) and the associated level of take-up by customers. Due to this, it helps to understand any key changes in network deployments since the start of the year, and there have been a few.

The first thing to note is that a fair few operators deploying Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology have had a bit of a rough year, with many reporting job losses and a slowing of their builds due to wider market pressures (rising costs, competition etc.). Nevertheless, the rollout has continued at a fairly strong pace, and thus coverage has clearly improved above (Summary of Full Fibre Build Progress).

Most of the gigabit-capable coverage continues to be fuelled by commercial roll-outs in urban areas, which is expected to reach c. 80% in 2025. The Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme, which focuses on rural premises that won’t benefit from commercial builds, then aims to lift this up to at least 85% by 2025, followed by “at least” 99% by 2030. The latter programme started to have a small but positive impact during 2023.

As for mobile networks, both 4G and 5G coverage recorded some improvements during 2023. The commercial 5G deployment showed the biggest change, but this year also saw the industry-led £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) project make progress on boosting geographic 4G coverage too (here) – aiming to hit 95% of the UK from at least one operator by the end of 2025.

Fastest Major Fixed Broadband ISPs (H2 2023 vs H2 2022)

The data in this report stems from Thinkbroadband’s independent speedtest database (inc. ISPreview’s Broadband Speedtest). The table below only includes the largest and most established independent ISPs with strong national availability, but there is a separate table for smaller alternative networks on page 2 – these are difficult to include because they aren’t yet available to the majority of premises and thus don’t produce much test data.

Naturally, there are caveats to consider with speedtest based studies like this, not least because such scores tend to be more reflective of take-up than network availability. For example, some ISPs may have a much larger proportion of customers on slower copper ADSL or FTTC lines, which can weigh against anybody on faster FTTP packages with the same provider (i.e. pulling average speeds down). The opposite can also be true.

The big change this time is that our main top list below will now only be focusing on performance amongst the biggest ISPs (subscriber size), which largely reflects how the market is changing and the difficulty of keeping track of so many different options. As a result we had sought to add Utility Warehouse and Shell Energy to the table, but TBB can’t currently distinguish their results from the crowd of ISPs on the same wholesale networks.

Average Download Speeds – Top 8

Average Upload Speeds – Top 8

Overall, the average download speed of the top national providers was 114.35Mbps and the average upload speed hit 29.25Mbps. The biggest performance gain this year came from Vodafone, which mostly reflects the growing adoption of faster FTTP packages on their respective CityFibre and Openreach networks.

Curiously the ISP with the smallest gain was BT, which perhaps suggests that a lot of the customers they’re converting to FTTP are taking slower speeds as part of that upgrade. Sky Broadband is in a similar boat to BT, although they’ve long since stopped publishing any data about their broadband base and thus it’s much harder to know what’s happening.

Satellites

Since early 2022 we’ve also been tracking the results for SpaceX’s satellite based Starlink broadband service. Sadly, not enough data exists to include other satellite platforms or providers, but that may change in the future. Otherwise, Starlink’s download and upload performance appears to have slipped a bit during 2023, which follows after the H1 2023 period showed a slight improvement.

Now flick over to page 2 to see how the fastest full fibre alternative network (altnet) ISPs and mobile operators performed.