SpeedGeo Q2 2026 Study Rank Virgin Media Fastest for UK Broadband and Three for Mobile
The SpeedGeo project, which compares internet connection quality by benchmarking the speeds of real users, has published their Q2 2026 results and once again named Virgin Media as the fastest fixed broadband ISP. At the same time they’ve also named Three UK as the fastest mobile broadband (4G, 5G) operator. But there are caveats.
The latest Q2 2026 study is based on data gathered from real measurements conducted by users of their V-SPEED applications, including via their website, as well as on Android, iOS, Windows and macOS. A total of just 98,967 tests were conducted across mobile connections using smartphones or tablets between 1st July 2025 and 30th June 2026, which increased to 864,028 tests for fixed broadband (inc. Wi-Fi and cabled connections).
As with the above note, there are always other caveats to consider with speedtest based studies like this, not least because the results for broadband lines tend to be more reflective of take-up than network availability. For example, some fixed ISPs may have a much larger proportion of customers on slower copper-based lines, which can weigh against those on faster FTTP services with the same provider (i.e. pulling the average down).
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The SpeedGeo study also only lists three providers for each of the two categories (fixed and mobile), which misses a lot of key players (e.g. Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, O2) and completely ignores the many significantly faster alternative broadband networks that now exist across the UK. But this is both because of their limited data sample size, and the fact that they only include operators if they account for more than 3% of all tests in a given category and location during a specific quarter.
Otherwise, the operators in both the fixed and mobile categories were all ranked based on average download speed (from highest to lowest), although they’ve also included figures for upload speeds and network latency (milliseconds), which is nice to have. We only wish more studies would do the same.
SpeedGeo – Q2 2026 Fastest UK Fixed Broadband ISPs
| Provider | Download (Mbps) | Upload (Mbps) | Ping (ms) |
| Virgin Media | 276 | 51.1 | 22.8 |
| Vodafone | 195 | 89 | 23.6 |
| BT (EE) | 140.9 | 36.8 | 21.1 |
SpeedGeo – Q2 2026 Fastest UK Mobile Operators
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| Provider | Download (Mbps) | Upload (Mbps) | Ping (ms) |
| Three UK | 107.9 | 16.5 | 41.8 |
| EE (BT) | 83.7 | 18.6 | 36.7 |
| Vodafone | 69.9 | 13.8 | 43 |
The SpeedGeo database does give some results for the providers that didn’t make the above ranking, which for fixed broadband shows Sky Broadband as coming in 4th (137.7Mbps download) and TalkTalk in 5th (105.1Mbps). As for mobile, O2 were in 4th place with a download speed of 58.9Mbps. But their data samples for these will be much smaller.
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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I use nperf, get 2.4 symmetrical on community fibre.
Londpon only – they all only seem to think London is the UK. I left them a multi Gig test for giggles
Can be summarised as: “Virgin are the fastest out of the three ISPs we measured.” What a pointless report. What about the hundreds of providers out there, many of which offer services FAR faster than those reported here.
I’m going to authorise my own study. The only participant will be Sky’s 5 Gbps package, which I will crown as the UK’s fastest broadband package ever to exist.
YouFibre and B4RN provide faster packages? Well they won’t be included in my study, so obviously, they are not the fastest.
Reporting aggregate Mobile numbers without regard to the 4G 5G split is how to make that pointless, rather like averaging FTTC and FTTP together. A how not to example.