The UK has slipped down the global broadband speed league tables
The UK has slipped down the global broadband speed league tables
M-Lab, a partnership between Google Open Source Research and Princeton University’s PlantLab, had been able to compile data that spans across 12 months and 200 nations to discover which country offers the fastest internet on average.
Cable UK has analysed this data to provide the global broadband leaderboard, allowing us to rank nations based on their average broadband speed and judge their improvements each year.
The UK’s average internet connection speed has increased from 16.51Mbps to 18.57Mbps, an increase of 2.06Mbps, which is a boost of roughly 12.7%. The global average internet speed is 9.10Mbps, less than half of what the UK offers, though the average global internet speed has seen a much larger increase of 23%, which means that global internet speeds are increasing faster than the UK average.
The UK has dropped from 31st place on the global leaderboard to 35th, a slip which is expected to continue moving into 2019. This trend is thanks to the UK’s slow rollout of FTTP (Fibre to the Premises), full-fibre, infrastructure, with most consumers relying on ageing copper or FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) connectivity.
Cable’s telecom’s analyst Dan Howdle stated that it is “somewhat sad to see the UK not faring better” and that “Compared with many other countries both in and out of Europe, the UK has simply come too late to a full-fibre solution.”
The world’s highest average broadband speeds are currently offered by Singapore, who now provide a mean download speed of 60.39 Mbps, which is three times higher than the UK. This broadband disparity showcases how much work needs to be done before the UK can become a global broadband leader.
Some areas of the UK have broadband speeds that are so slow that communities have started to develop their own infrastructure to outpace the slow rollout of fibre infrastructure in the UK. The Welsh village of Michaelston-y-Fedw has recently created a Community Interest Company (CIC) to deliver Gb fibre broadband to the area, smashing their previous average broadband speeds of 4Mbps.
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