2022 vs 2021 – UK Broadband and Mobile Speeds vs the World

Once again, we’re ending this year by taking a look back to see how the United Kingdom’s position, at least in terms of the top 50 fastest countries for both fixed broadband ISP and mobile (4G, 5G) data speeds, has changed since 2021. The UK fell from 35th to 44th for mobile and from 50th to 56th for fixed lines.

The report below was created by tracking the publicly available data released by Ookla, which runs the most popular Speedtest.net service for benchmarking internet connections around the world. In our experience, the company’s performance data has tended to weigh more towards the optimistic side, but for the purpose of this article that isn’t such a concern because it applies equally to every country in the table.

The main differentiator for speeds between countries tends to stem from the balance between network availability and the take-up of faster connection types. For example, countries with a high availability of gigabit-capable broadband networks (FTTP, DOCSIS 3.1 – 4.0 etc.) or strong 5G mobile availability (with plenty of radio spectrum to harness) will usually rank highest in the table.

In terms of the UK, we’ve seen a strong and continuous improvement in the availability of both faster fixed and mobile networks. For example, Ofcom recently revealed (here) that 1Gbps capable fixed broadband networks had reached 70% (up from 47% last year), which falls to 42% when only looking at full fiber / FTTP lines (up from 28%). Similarly, both EE and Three UK have extended 5G to reach more than 50% of the population, with other operators expected to follow in 2023.

Top 50 Fastest Countries for Broadband in 2022

Overall we can see from the data below that fixed and mobile broadband speeds have continued to improve across the world but, despite big improvements in UK full fiber and 5G coverage, other countries still seem able to improve their real-world speeds at a faster pace . Part of this may be because the domestic UK take-up of full fiber and gigabit broadband lines is still in the early phase of growth (take-up often lags behind new network construction and takes time to grow). We’ve summarized some of the key changes below.

Otherwise, the following tables show how the countries compare, using only download speed as the key measure, across the top 50 countries. Unfortunately, Ookla doesn’t make it easy to do the same table for uploads or latency.

NOTE: Data gathered at the same time in late November each year – using a “median” average.

Fastest 50 Countries for Fixed Broadband Speed ​​(DL)

Fastest 50 Countries for Mobile Speed ​​(DL)