Map of UK and European Countries Ranked by Mobile Broadband Speed

A new batch of crowd-sourced data from RFBenchmark compares European countries by their Mobile Broadband (3G / 4G) performance. Overall the UK appears to trail most other countries with an average download of 11.9Mbps (4.2Mbps upload) and network latency of 108 milliseconds.

In Q3 2017 Hungary, Lithuania and Luxembourg were named as the countries that recorded the fastest mobile data transfer rates in Europe. The average downloading speed in Hungary reached as high as 79.55Mbps, while Luxembourg and Lithuania followed with speeds of 44.71Mbps and 44.61Mbps respectively.

In the category of average upload speed, Hungary and Luxembourg again topped the list with average uploads of 40.71Mbps and 35.84Mbps, which was followed by Denmark on an upload speed of 24.83Mbps. As for latency (the response time when sending data between servers), Estonia recorded the lowest (i.e. best) ping values with an average latency of 28ms (milliseconds).

Broadly speaking most countries seemed to beat the United Kingdom for download performance, except for the slowpokes of Greece, Ireland, Slovenia, Ukraine and Russia. A few other countries like Belarus, the Czech Republic and Slovakia appeared to deliver similar speeds to the UK.

However we should point out that gathering data from lots of different Smartphones via an app can also be subject to the differences or limits of end-user hardware, as well as general variations in 3G / 4G coverage and capacity etc. Similar reports from Open Signal (here) and Akamai (here) have tended to show the UK in a more favourable light, thus it’s wise to always take such basic data with a pinch of salt.

Mobile Download Speed

Mobile Upload Speed

Mobile Network Latency (Lower is Better)