17 October 2023 , 06:00
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Brits beware: your Internet is nowhere near as fast as it should be. That's the suggestion posed by new research from Opensignal, which tested broadband speeds across Europe to see how the UK stacks up.
It looked at average broadband speeds and consistency in 28 different countries across Europe—including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Greece and more.
While our neighbours in France and Spain enjoy blistering fast average download speeds of 121 to 114 Mb/s respectively, we in Britain lag behind with just 66.1 Mb/s to our names.
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The UK is even worse when it comes to upload speeds. While people in Spain get an average of 91.4Mb/s, the UK lags way down the bottom of the table with 20.6 Mb/s.
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The UK has some of the slowest broadband speeds in Europe, with our closest neighbours France enjoying Internet that's twice as fast (Opensignal)That means it takes us much longer to do anything online, from streaming TV and films to doing work on a laptop.
The good news is that the UK, while far from being the best in Europe, is by no means the worst. Countries like Greece, Estonia, Serbia and Austria all have much worse Internet than us.
Opensignal's Andrey Popov said: "Among the compared markets, France and Spain stand out with the best observed broadband network speeds."
He added: "Greece stands out as having the slowest broadband download speed and broadband upload speed measured among our users in Europe, with speeds of 36.5Mb/s and 7.3Mb/s, respectively."
Part of the reason the UK lags behind other countries in Europe is that much of our broadband infrastructure has been reliant on near-ancient copper phone networks. There are an estimated 21 million households in the UK which currently lack fiber optic capability, although this number is quickly changing as investment in fiber intensifies.
How to check your broadband speed
It's really easy to find out how quick your broadband upload and download speeds are. is a free service that will produce a detailed report of your Internet speeds on any device. Simply head to the website and click 'Go' to start the test. It's automatic so you don't have to do anything except wait for the result.