Broadband speeds of the UK behind other EU countries

Research undertaken by M-Lab, a partnership between Google Open Source Research and Princeton University's PlantLab, shows the UK has slipped from 31st to 35th place in the global broadband league tables and now is behind 25 other European countries.

An analysis of 163 million broadband speed tests across 200 countries shows Singapore as the world's fastest country and the slowest being Yemen.

A report published by the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission has called for full-fibre broadband to be deployed across the UK by 2033 with the target of 15 million homes to be reached by 2025.

Full-fibre, also known as fibre to the premises (FTTP), has been rejected by some providers as being too costly for large-scale rollouts; instead, many UK homes rely on the slower fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection.

However, other providers are rolling out faster services with FTTP around the UK with plans to reach millions of urban premises by 2022.

While the UK was behind in broadband speeds on the global front, it was doing well with other measurements like availability and speed. For instance, average broadband speeds in the UK are above the global average, having gone up in the past year to 18.5Mbps.

The principal analyst at research company Assembly, Matthew Howett, said: "Some countries are also of course easier to roll out broadband in. The fastest country in this survey, Singapore, is about the size of London and obviously doesn't have the same challenges with remote and rural areas that we have in Britain. Encouragingly, Britain is set for more fibre, with leading operators and their competitors all having committed to deploy so called full-fibre.”

While the UK's ranking on the global charts for broadband speeds is above 165 other countries, it is however in the bottom third of EU member states.