nPerf Finds Top EU Countries Beat UK for Mobile Broadband Speeds
Internet benchmarking firm nPerf has today released the results of a new study into mobile broadband (3G, 4G and 5G) performance across several EU countries, which analysed 61,696 internet speed tests via their app (crowdsourced) to reveal that the average UK download is 80Mbps – this makes the country slower than Italy, Spain, Germany, Ireland, France and Portugal.
The study, which is based on thousands of tests carried out between 1st January 2024 and 30th September 2024, reveals that Italy scored slightly faster than the UK on 81Mbps, followed by Spain (84Mbps), Germany (99Mbps), Ireland (102Mbps), France (113Mbps) and front-runner Portugal (177Mbps).
Elsewhere, the fastest device for mobile data connectivity in the United Kingdom was found to be the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The average speed with this Apple device has been 154Mbps, while Portugal also achieves the fastest speed with the same iPhone 15 Pro Max (an average of 269Mbps). The same Apple device is also the fastest in France and Germany, while Ireland ranks last with the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (133Mbps).
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Finally, in the United Kingdom, the average loading time for a webpage on mobile internet was 3.4 seconds, which compares poorly with Ireland (2s), France (2.8s), Italy (2.9s), Germany (3s), Portugal (3.2s) and Spain (3.2s). Sadly, the report didn’t include any other details or a breakdown by each mobile operator.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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is there an actual source link?
I’ve pulled 1.5Gbps on my 14 pro on Three uk.
Yup, same on my S23 Ultra.
I even get 200-500mbps on Three 5G from my house which is 1.7 miles away (straight line).
I’ve got results saved on my phone of in excess of 2gbps, this is on my old Poco F3 via Smarty, so no idea where they’re getting these speeds from, I guess they’re probably surveying farmers that live in the Highlands…
It’s an average of what I’m assuming is all networks across Europe and you don’t understand where the UK average (key word) comes from because you have a Speedtest that’s higher? Unless you get that speed everywhere in the Uk, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that it isn’t the same speed for every single persons Speedtest.
Have you opened the app? If so, you’ll see they’re basing their so called average from just over 1000 test runs, sorry but that ain’t an average of UK speeds, you need a much bigger data pool to get that info
I have not. Funny how they need a larger sample size now when you seemed to initially imply your previous results were more indicative of speeds in the whole of the UK on all networks.
Is this what mobile telecoms have come to? Measuring perceived success by download speeds….
What exactly is any user going to do with all this ‘speed’?
You only need around 20-25Mbs to watch the highest definition video on a large screen TV, it’s a lot less on a tiny mobile screen.
I think they need a new measure for measuring…. Perhaps how many Gone with the Wind films can be downloaded in a minute….
Oh and when these speed test apps are used the networks indemnify and prioritise them and boost bandwidth allocation to them.
No user actually gets or uses these sorts of speeds in normal daily use.
So not sure what value there is of putting countries into a league table like this other than it give the app some media exposure.
Perhaps they should provide more context, like how many users in each region and how much data is being consumed by them, but that would require MNO to provide.
Far better to measure and report on coverage, capacity, and performance, but these crowd source speed test apps can’t do that very well.
It needs to be done by drive testing to get granular consistent results, and specialist companies who do this have only just started really.