UK Ranks 2nd for Fixed Broadband Speed vs Countries of Similar Size to Romania
France-based internet connection benchmarking firm nPerf has this morning published the results from their first biannual (H1) 2026 crowdsourced study into fixed broadband ISP speeds among “countries comparable in size to Romania“, which saw the United Kingdom rank 2nd with an overall score of 126,638 nPoints (just behind Romania on 128,587).
The somewhat quirky study is based on masses of speed tests carried out – between January and May 2026 – by users of the performance testing tools on both nPerf’s website and via their dedicated mobile testing apps for Android and iOS. But we don’t get any hard stats on the sample sizes or structure. This analysis covers 20 countries with land areas ranging from 119,000 to 477,000 km² – a scope that includes diverse territories such as Sweden, Vietnam, and Morocco.
The scoring system is said to reflect an aggregation of several technical criteria – such as download speed, connection stability, and streaming quality – to reflect a daily user experience. For instance, a high score enables smooth viewing of 4K content without buffering, or downloading large files in seconds. Conversely, lower scores may indicate slowdowns during videoconferencing or prolonged wait times for loading complex web pages.
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The UK achieved a score of 126,638 nPoints, placing it just 1,949 nPoints behind Romania, the top-ranked country. Sweden (126,415 nPoints) and Norway (123,768 nPoints) follow closely behind. At the other end of the spectrum came Senegal (77,421 nPoints) and Tunisia (60,427 nPoints).
Overall, we’re not sure how useful this kind of unusual and narrow study is and a breakdown of the key performance figures would have been more helpful, but make of it what you will.
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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The UK on the left side of a leaderboard and nearly at the top.
Or… “Study Claims 18 Percent of UK Broadband Homes Fail to Receive Min 10Mbps Speed”. So which do we believe? Maybe neither. Do you think they start with the answer and work backwards from there? I think I’ll stop reading these “studies”/surveys.