UK broadband speeds versus the world – how are we performing?

If you’ve ever had connection problems with your home broadband, you might have been directed by your ISP’s technical support team to visit a website called Ookla.

Despite sounding like a character from a Terry Pratchett novel, Ookla is actually a leading provider of line speed checks.

These are useful little applications hosted on websites, which test how quickly your current connection can upload and download data, before displaying the results.

Many other broadband speed checkers exist online, but Ookla is often nominated by ISPs due to the consistency of its results.

Another valuable service the company provides is the annual aggregation of internet connections, across the UK and also internationally.

This generates an interesting snapshot into how UK broadband speeds compare with other nations, albeit with a fair amount of line speed terminology thrown in.

First the good news…

Putting aside the vagaries and inconsistencies of 4G/5G connections, Ookla’s findings concentrate on fixed line connectivity.

In this regard, the UK has improved its performance considerably compared to other nations, rising from 56th in the 2023 fixed line speed analysis to 44th at the end of 2024.

This was largely due to a leap in fixed line download speeds, which soared from just under 85Mbps in 2023 to 117.5Mbps last year.

That’s an increase of over 30Mbps – itself the equivalent of having three ADSL lines added to your connection – and means the UK now has faster downloads than the global average.

Having languished in mid-table mediocrity for years in terms of download speeds, this suggests the rollout of full fibre broadband has markedly improved UK broadband speeds.

…Then the bad

While you can interpret data in many different ways, the international context to these speed tests does show where the UK is lagging behind.

A fixed line upload speed increase of 25 per cent year-on-year sounds great in isolation.

It sounds less impressive when you consider global speeds were already much higher, and increased at the same proportion.

Consequently, the gap between UK and global fixed line upload speeds widened from 16Mbps to 20Mbps.

There was also no improvement in the UK’s average latency rate of 13ms compared to the year before – still almost 50 per cent higher than the corresponding global figure.

Which countries led the way?

While you might expect western European countries to dominate a national league table of download speeds, it’s Far Eastern nations which excel.

Singapore and Hong Kong finished first and third respectively, sandwiching the United Arab Emirates – the only country other than Singapore to have average speeds exceeding 300Mbps.

Surprisingly, Chile finished fourth with speeds of 279Mbps, while the United States pipped France to fifth place.

Smaller nations dominated the top twenty, with the likes of Iceland, Israel and Taiwan demonstrating the benefits of limited land mass and tightly packed populations.

The UK may have climbed a dozen places, but we still ended up sandwiched between Malaysia and Trinidad & Tobago.

Malta, Jordan, Lithuania and even Vietnam all achieved higher average download speeds.

Still, there were some compensations.

While the UK’s line speeds rose, China’s fell, and many countries slid down the rankings – not least the countries whose line speeds are now slower than ours.

Our increase in line speeds shouldn’t be taken for granted, either. This can only occur after substantial investment in cabling and wider network infrastructure.

The next time you curse your broadband for buffering, remember things could be – and have been – far slower…