H1 2026 Study Names Top UK Fastest Mobile and Home Broadband ISPs

Overall, everybody saw some improvement during the first half of the year, with Vodafone reporting the biggest performance gains for downloads and EE doing the best for uploads. As usual we suspect that most of these improvements will be coming from customers upgrading to faster networks, primarily moving from copper to full fibre ones.

Similarly, those who already have full fibre packages may be upgrading to faster tiers, which can also help to move the performance dial forward. The biggest change to watch out for next year will be Openreach’s move to introduce even faster multi-gigabit tiers. Over time such changes tend to trickle down, which can result in those on slower entry-level packages getting faster speeds too.

Top 20 Fastest Smaller Broadband ISPs (H1 2026 vs H2 2025)

The following table reflects a list of the fastest smaller providers, which also includes some large-ish providers that may not have strong national availability due to the limited coverage of their underlying network(s). This is intended to provide some useful context against the biggest and most widely available market players above.

The table below is ordered by median download speed, but for extra context we’ve also included a figure for upload performance in brackets. Most of the providers in this list are faster than the major players because they’re often connected to alternative networks with faster entry-level speeds and will have a low portion of users (sometimes none at all) on older copper-based lines; but there are always exceptions (e.g. older ISPs are more likely to suffer from a legacy base of slower lines).

Top 20 Smaller ISPs – Average Downloads (Upload)

The catch above is that smaller providers also produce a smaller data sample, which means that these results can fluctuate a lot more between reports. As a result, internet providers are more likely to both dip into and out of the above list, between updates, due to many of them struggling to produce the minimum required level of test data.

For example, in this update we had to remove Brsk (now merged into YouFibre), while Squirrel Internet, Wessex Internet and Ogi were separately cut due to a lack of data. But in their place we added Grain Connect, Rise Fibre, Voneus and Airband.

Satellites

ISPreview also keeps track of the results for SpaceX’s satellite based Starlink broadband service. Sadly, not enough data exists to include other satellite platforms or providers (yet), but that may change in the future (Amazon’s Leo will be added in the future). Otherwise, Starlink’s average download performance appears to have decreased during the first half of 2026 and it’s a similar story for their upload performance.

However, we expect speeds to improve again in the not-too-distant future, once Starlink starts launching their GEN3 satellites into orbit (unclear precisely when we can expect this due to delays with Space’s Starship rocket) and upgrades or expands some of their gateway (ground) stations in the UK.

The Fastest Mobile Operators

Mobile speeds remain a difficult area to study because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor and underground), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment is ever changeable (weather, trees, buildings etc.). All of this can impact signal quality and that’s before we consider any differences in network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum usage between locations.

Suffice to say that studies of mobile broadband speed are inherently open to variation, but the top networks often tend to be those with a combination of the best 4G or 5G coverage, a good amount of radio spectrum and strong bakchaul capacity.

Average Mobile Download Speeds – H1 2026 vs H2 2025

Average Mobile Upload Speeds – H1 2026 vs H2 2025

Overall, the average download speed of the four primary mobile operators was 28.75Mbps (up from 26.75Mbps in H2 2025) and the average upload speed hit 5.6Mbps (up from 4.7Mbps). Interestingly both Vodafone and O2 saw a dip in download performance, which is unusual considering that both have been heavily investing in network upgrades, mergers and the deployment of 5G+ (5G Standalone) technology.

On the flip side, Vodafone delivered the fastest upload speeds, which may well reflect one of the benefits of 5G+ technology (i.e. it tends to be more of an upload than download booster), although we’re unsure why O2 failed to show a similar sort of improvement. At present we’re still listing Three and Vodafone as being separate because the two networks are still in the process of merging their networks.

Otherwise, the market for 5G services in the UK is now starting to reach a degree of maturity, with swings of c.5-10% in one direction or the other becoming somewhat common between biannual updates. On the other hand, the newer generation of faster Standalone 5G (SA) / 5G+ networks don’t seem to be having much of an overall performance impact, yet.

Finally, we’re not expecting Ofcom’s late 2025 auction of 5G spectrum in the mmW bands – 26GHz and 40GHz – to have much of an impact on these results. This is because it will take time for mobile operators to introduce related services and for device support to improve, as well as the fact that such bands are rather niche (i.e. mostly focused on improving connectivity in busy urban areas and for fixed wireless links).