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UK's average broadband speed below most of its EU neighbours

by Mark Tyson on 8 August 2017, 12:02

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Broadband comparison site cable.co.uk has compiled a new worldwide league table of internet speeds. It has found that the UK sits in 31st place in the table, behind the majority of its European neighbours. The average download speed according to the latest data gathered by cable.co.uk is 16.51Mbps.

Sitting above the UK are, predictably, more compact, population dense East Asian countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan. However many of our European neighbours have much better average download speeds. Sweden is second place in the worldwide table with 40Mbps, and Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Norway, Belgium and Switzerland (the 10th placed Swiss have a 26.93Mbps average) all feature in the top 10.

Other recent surveys by SamKnows and Akamai have placed the UK higher in the broadband league tables. However, cable.co.uk says that its analysis was fuller, compiling data from research group M-Lab, a partnership between New America's Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research and Princeton University's PlanetLab. That's aggregating "more than 63 million speed tests had been carried out across the world in the 12 months up to 10 May 2017".

Looking at the nether regions of the 189 country league table, Africa accounts for more than half of the slowest-performers. The absolute slowest quintet of countries are; Somalia (0.62Mbps), the DR Congo, Burkina Faso, Gabon, and Yemen (0.34Mbps).

Commenting on the research Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms analyst at Cable.co.uk, said that the results give a fresh perspective on how the UK is placed within the world regarding broadband connectivity. "Relatively speaking, we are near the top of the table. However, many of those ahead of us – some a long way ahead – are our neighbours both in the EU and wider Europe," said Howdle. He added that we have clear lessons to learn from those sitting atop of the table and many of our near neighbours in Europe.



HEXUS Forums :: 33 Comments

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Grass Grows, Wind Blows, Fire burns…oh, sorry thought we were stating the obvious :P

</sarcasm>
Average?
Heck, try 0.7Mbps…!
Ttaskmaster
Average?
Heck, try 0.7Mbps…!

If we take your BB away we can increase the UK average so it's probably best to stay quiet. ;) :D
Where I live fiber was sorted around a year and a half ago but max speed is 40Mbps, our average speed though is around 18Mbps during the day (logging into router it says it is connected at around 23 but wiring in to the router you never get that) if the weather is bad it drops to half that and from around 4pm tilll 10pm it drops to around 7Mbps if bad weather and the usual hammering the network gets at that time of day.

Trouble round here is that there is very little competition to Sky and BT, yeah you have things like Talk Talk etc but nothing has really been done to improve the network or even sort out what they call superfast which is upto 80Mbps. It is annoying that our local council at the time Virgin was still known as Comcast refused to subsidise the installation of their fiber network so it never happened, they have recently started installing Virgin in outllying areas so we are hoping that it will head our way in the next year or so. If that does happen then BT and Sky are REALLY going to have to pull their fingers out.
All I see is a list of countries in order of ability to download pirated content the quickest :)

For legitimate, domestic use, 16Mbps is fine. Gaming, surfing and a couple of simultaneous HD streams are possible with that.

And bearing in mind this is an average, many people will be getting quite a bit more than 16Mbps.

..Having said that, I wouldn't want to swap it for my current 210Mbps Fibre connection.