As ever the devil is in the detail…

Singapore - a city-state where people live in very large appartment blocks so getting a few hundred meg is easy if the building is getting a gig.

Iceland - most of the population live in 1 small city

Hungary - we paid for their infrastructure so it's much, much newer than ours

USA - cable is faster than POTS, they have a lot of cable

A lot of the rest shown there have higher averages for the same reason as Singapore - much higher propertion of appartment block acccomodation. We've got gigabit connections to many such block in London now with it being pretty standard in new higher-spec blocks.

Another thing for blighty is it's fast enough for most people - as long as iplayer works and people can browse tinder/facebook they are happy.

gagaga
Another thing for blighty is it's fast enough for most people - as long as iplayer works and people can browse tinder/facebook they are happy.

Define “most people”. It's highly subjective if OpenReach provide adequate speeds, personally I think they're positively antiquated compared to what Virgin provided me more than 10 years ago.

What about Sweden and Spain then.

gagaga
Iceland - most of the population live in 1 small city

About one third of the population live in the capital.

I am on Fiber and get 18mb down and 1mb up, it's shocking how bad broadband can be.

Platinum
I am on Fiber and get 18mb down and 1mb up, it's shocking how bad broadband can be.

Try telling that to my parents - 3.5 MBit on “fibre” with 0.4 up.

I would have expected Germany to be a bit better too, considering they're the largest economy in Europe.

Kvasi
What about Sweden and Spain then.

Just to add to what gagaga has already correctly stated: Sweden have a load of overhead cabling from what I recall, and it's less-than-tidy in some areas. Same in parts of the USA. It's a fair bit cheaper to roll-out that way vs ducting but can cost more in the long run e.g. with breakage, maintenance, etc. BT's early trials/rollouts of FTTP were using very labour-intensive installation methods more like what you'd see for leased lines, but they're now switching to things like pre-terminated fibre and IIRC using mechanical vs fusion splicing at the customer handover point. It should mean cheaper/faster FTTP commissioning going forward, and that's indeed what we're seeing with the current push.

No idea about Spain.

You also have to remember the UK's copper network is relatively good quality vs what a lot of the rest of the world has (e.g. aluminium and/or very long lines) and the range to things like cabinets/exchanges has been more suitable for DSL. Some countries don't share our telephone architecture of being within a couple of km of a physical exchange building for DSL equipment either. Sure, there are some outliers in mainly rural areas, and some on long/poor quality lines for VDSL, but overall the need was arguably less critical than for countries where faster DSL technologies just weren't a commercially viable option, VDSL was in the UK, and has done a good job for a majority of UK premises.

Virgin's network already has the capability to offer greater configured speeds than it currently does, but Virgin clearly aren't seeing enough of a demand for it yet.

TBH though there's far, far more to overall broadband quality than averaged burst speeds. And rankings like this are certainly not comparing apples to apples.

The Hand;4071875
I would have expected Germany to be a bit better too, considering they're the largest economy in Europe.

It's possibly down to them being closer to the UK's situation then, taking account of existing infrastructure, types of premises being served, terrain, usage patterns, etc then. It's not all down to economy or government.

Edit: As the ispreview article says though, the source isn't even clear about their testing methodology, so apply a large pinch of salt to the numbers and assume a large error margin.

Biggest problem is a lack of flexibility for private companies to install their own lines. Few companies have the investment power to install cables in ducts/drains etc like Virgin but nor do they have the capability of upgrading lines themselves. If OpenReach were out of the way, EE, Vodafone, TalkTalk etc would have the ability to offer upgraded lines for a price to individual customers. Given I can't get Virgin, I'd happily pay the right price for FTTP

I'm from the US, in a major metropolitan area, and I find their claim that the *average* download speed is 107 Mbps… rather dubious. That may be the speeds ISPs *claim* for any given area, but I'll be damned if anyone ever gets that. I don't know how many times I've either sought or been advertised for higher bandwidth, only to be told “well, yes in your area, but not in your house.”

Wozza63
Biggest problem is a lack of flexibility for private companies to install their own lines. Few companies have the investment power to install cables in ducts/drains etc like Virgin but nor do they have the capability of upgrading lines themselves. If OpenReach were out of the way, EE, Vodafone, TalkTalk etc would have the ability to offer upgraded lines for a price to individual customers. Given I can't get Virgin, I'd happily pay the right price for FTTP

Lack of what sort of flexibility? Also why do OR get the blame for other companies' decisions here? The likes of Vodafone and TalkTalk can and do install their own physical networks in some areas, but I'm not sure what sort of ‘upgraded line’ you're talking about? Rolling out FTTP involves far more than just replacing the last drop wire with a length of fibre! Don't forget EE is part of the BT group now.

Vodafone is a huge company, bigger than BT (and have done FTTP rollouts in other countries too), so it's not like they're a little guy in the industry, and OpenReach as far as I know are required to allow duct access to other companies if they don't want to go to the effort/expense of laying their own. I'm not sure if that includes OR helping them out when they run into the same real-world problems of e.g. full/collapsed ducts that OR themselves have to deal with though.

Even at peak times, I get fairly decent speeds on Virgin Media. I hear very few complaints about their service and speed in general.

Like quite a few rural properties / areas, I'm still stuck on ADSL2+ and 2k+ of copper. Can't really “ever” see them running fibre up here for half a dozen properties. So articles like this make me smile.

wtf is the chart cropped, just show the uncropped? feels a bit click-batty

mikeo
Like quite a few rural properties / areas, I'm still stuck on ADSL2+ and 2k+ of copper. Can't really “ever” see them running fibre up here for half a dozen properties. So articles like this make me smile.

Sparse rural areas will undoubtedly be the most difficult ones financially, maybe we'll see some sort of government subsidy to push out to the last few percent? And IMO it would make sense for new builds regardless of length to have fibre run alongside copper even if it's not connected up yet, given the civil engineering part is often the most costly, particularly in those rural areas.

Satellite broadband is often suggested as an alternative but the latency is pretty high for anything like gaming, and I imagine it's high enough to make general web browsing sluggish too.

globalwarning
I'm from the US, in a major metropolitan area, and I find their claim that the *average* download speed is 107 Mbps… rather dubious. That may be the speeds ISPs *claim* for any given area, but I'll be damned if anyone ever gets that. I don't know how many times I've either sought or been advertised for higher bandwidth, only to be told “well, yes in your area, but not in your house.”

Yeah, 100Mbps is rare in the US, and certainly not for the price mentioned. In Seattle, 54GBP will buy you ‘Up to’ 60Mbps from Comcast, which likely equates to a realistic 20Mbps before it's throttled. Better than it used to be, but not deserving of a place on the top ten.

I'm on Virgin and getting in the region of 100Mbps, probably not quite that most days but more than enough for everything I do.

I wouldn't go back to any of the other providers in my area though as they all run through BT infrastructure which is just broken here. In the sense that there's a physical fault somewhere on the copper line serving my house which Openreach never successfuly repaired - I could get ~30Mbps on a good day but the connection would frequently drop out/slow to 1-2Mbps.

Heard more than a few bad things about Virgin's service, especially for real world reliability (packet loss, oversubscription, crippled upload bandwidth, inconsistent training & ethics of engineers) over the years.

I'd still try them if they even served our area with their own network.

I'm on Virgin and always get at least the headline rate (200mbps currently), and don't have any contention issues, which is surprising, as there's no other fibre, so if you want ‘fast’, it has to be Virgin. The only issue we've had is last week, when the network team came to fix an issue with noise on the line, unplugged those who were showing as being affected, then forgot who went where, and just left it, with the attitude ‘they’ll ring up when they notice'. The poor guy from the home install team had 4 more to do after us at 4pm, and had to go through a whole long process of box-ticking, when he knew exactly what the issue was. funny thing is, our service wasn't deteriorated, we were still getting headline rates and low pings, but they still came and replaced the cable between street and house. Result? Same.

Avg. Monthly Cost £30

Haha, so untrue. Well, maybe on talk talk, but then the 55mbps turns to 5mbps

Troopa
wtf is the chart cropped, just show the uncropped? feels a bit click-batty

You mean because it doesn't show every single country on the planet? Good point, it is a bit click-batty.

re Virgin … I solidly get 380mbps with only occasional slowdowns. I'm running a chinese box with a kaby lake i7, 8gb RAM, SSD, Intel LANs and Sophos UTM as the firewall as the main limiter previously was the quad core atom box I had :).

Re their speed - the 20meg upload cap is apparently structural .. when much of the network was built out it included hard filters in place as the low frequencies used for upload were never considered to need to carry more than signaling from the box to the control centre so they filtered it to keep the signal clean/reduce interference. Trouble is they need to remove those filters to get more bandwidth up and they have no record of where they actually are in the network. I suspect at somepoint they'll try to offer more than 20mbps but it'll still be advertised as 20 with more being pot-luck as to whether you're on a clean part of the network.

For those with Virgin issues - it's the v3 box (and the v2 before) that are crap. I run mine as just a modem now (not even a router let alone wifi) and it seems to behave, but from what I read it's leaving the box in bells and whistles mode that causes the grief.

gagaga
As ever the devil is in the detail…


Hungary - we paid for their infrastructure so it's much, much newer than ours

Sorry, who paid for their infrastructure? Who's “we”?

They forgot a few countries. In Romania we have 1gbps for 15 euro per month.I think this easily puts us on 1st place.

A lot Germania's infrastructure was fully renewed in the late 40's and again in the late 80's.
Romania went from tin-cans on string to brand new cables with EU help …

yeeeeman
They forgot a few countries. In Romania we have 1gbps for 15 euro per month.I think this easily puts us on 1st place.

A package being available does not mean every single resident is subscribed to it, paying that price and/or reliably attaining that bitrate.

Having said that it's an obviously flawed comparison so it's academic at best. It's also a bit silly for it to compare prices across countries with vastly different economies. What is possible in one country for a given price could very well be effectively impossible in another due to different material, labour, utility costs, etc.