UK Ranks 35th out of 229 Countries for Broadband Speed in 2024

Analyst firm M-Lab and comparison site Cable.co.uk have today published their 2024 global broadband ISP speeds report, which reveals that the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) download speed of 110.99Mbps (up from 93.62Mbps last year) – ranking us 35th fastest in the world (down from 34th in 2023).

The research itself stems from information gathered via 1.5 billion speed tests (up from 1.3bn last year), which were carried out across the world in 229 countries in a 12-month period up to 30th June 2024. The average global broadband download speed was recorded as 55.58Mbps (Megabits per second), which is up from 45.60Mbps last year.

Overall, the top five fastest “countries” in the world this year were found to be Iceland (279.55Mbps), Jersey – a British crown dependency (273.51Mbps), Macao (234.74Mbps), Liechtenstein (222.98Mbps) and Denmark (210.51Mbps). Most of these are in Europe and are very small or island nations, where Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) networks are usually prevalent.

On the flip side, the five countries in the world with the slowest network speeds were the British Indian Ocean Territory (2.38Mbps), Turkmenistan (2.72Mbps), Syria (2.80Mbps), Yemen (2.99Mbps) and Tajikistan (3.10Mbps). In fact 35 countries failed to achieve download speeds of 10Mbps or greater, which is deemed by Ofcom UK to be the minimum required to cope with the needs of a typical family or small business, although this figure is quite an old one.

At this point some might wonder, given the rapid rollout of FTTP, why the UK isn’t ranking even higher in 2024. But we suspect there could be several reasons for this, not least because many of the leading countries in this table have been building FTTP at scale for a lot longer. Not to mention that other countries have also been improving their speeds and take-up by consumers, so the world is far from standing still.

Caveats of the Data

As we’ve said before, speed testing-based reports like this should be taken with a pinch of salt because they can easily be misinterpreted. For example, nobody should be equating such studies to be directly reflecting the availability of faster connections, as the two are far from being in perfect sync.

On top of that, people are more likely to measure their speed if there is something wrong or if they aren’t getting the speed they need, which can produce a negative bias. The fact that the study also overlooks other key metrics, such as upload speeds and latency, is another consideration.

Just for some context on actual network availability in the UK. We reported last month (here) that “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) networks were available to 98% of premises, which falls to 83.4% for gigabit-capable (1000Mbps+) networks and 67.7% when only looking at FTTP technology. The government wants 85% to be within reach of gigabit speeds by the end of 2025 and nationwide (c.99%) coverage by the end of 2030.

Such testing can also be impacted by other factors, such as poor home wiring (copper lines), user choice of package (e.g. 1Gbps could be available, but people may pick a slower and cheaper tier), local network congestion (i.e. conducting a test while others or background tasks are using the network) and slow WiFi etc.

Finally, it’s unclear whether this study has also lumped mobile data (4G, 5G etc.) speeds or business connections in with residential fixed lines. Nevertheless, if we assume that such caveats will apply to all countries, then the data is still useful as a rough gauge of market change over time.

229 Countries Ranked by Average (Mean) Download Speed