Ookla H1 2026 Study Names the Fastest Big UK Fixed Broadband Providers

A new study that collected data from Ookla’s popular Speedtest.net service for benchmarking internet connections has named BT as the fastest of the major UK broadband ISPs, beating out competition from Virgin Media, Vodafone, Sky Broadband, Plusnet (part of the BT Group) and last place sitter TalkTalk.

The results of this crowdsourced study are typically based off consumer speed tests that have been conducted either via the Speedtest.net website or, for greater accuracy, it’s dedicated app. Admittedly this sort of data does have its caveats, such as with the potential for it to be impacted by other aspects of the connection (e.g. slow Wi-Fi, local network congestion, the performance of Ookla’s own servers and consumer package choice), which means that it may not always reflect the actual capability of your broadband connection.

Overall BT was named as having delivered the fastest “Speedtest Connectivity Score” with a result of 78.73 out of 100 points, as well as the best “Speed Score” on 66.98 (admittedly having two generically titled speed award categories like this is confusing), the best “Video Streaming Score” on 83.60 and the best “Web Browsing Score” with 97.37 points. In all four categories they were very closely followed by runner-up Virgin Media (O2).

The main Speedtest Connectivity Score category is said to combine various real-world network performance metrics, such as service speeds (downloads vs uploads), latency, web browsing and video streaming. However, for BT the study only refers to the “BT full fibre network“, which is then said to include BT, EE and BT business customers (we’re unsure why Plusnet gets a separate entry, yet EE did not). In addition, this makes it unclear whether the study separated out BT’s slower FTTC and ADSL lines from its results, particularly as they don’t make this distinction for other ISPs in the table.

In terms of the raw download speed results, Virgin Media is actually listed as delivering the fastest median average speed of 272.56Mbps, which is above BT’s result of 258.04Mbps. But BT was the fastest for upload speeds on 70.02Mbps, which put them above Virgin Media on 51.09Mbps and that’s likely to be the reason why they just edged ahead of Virgin in the general speed category. We’ve summarised some of the key results below.

Results of Ookla’s Fixed Broadband ISP Speed Study (H1 2026)

One other catch with this study is that it seems to deliberately exclude smaller providers and alternative broadband networks, many of which are often significantly faster than the biggest retail ISPs.

Ookla Q1-Q2 2026 UK Fixed Broadband ISP Speed Study
https://www.bt.com/../ookla-uk-broadband-network-performance-report-h1-2026.pdf