Global broadband is becoming faster, but pricing has stagnated this past year
Though global broadband speeds are accelerating by around 20% annually, the average price of a broadband package hasn't fallen in the past 12 months – something we expect to see year on year. Then again, it has been a rather unusual year for almost every country.
If measured since 2017, however, broadband is becoming cheaper globally. Despite uncovering numerous examples where the broadband landscape of individual countries has shifted significantly (most often from ADSL to fibre or FTTH) during this period, providers cannot charge what users cannot pay. Typically, providers are upgrading or improving their networks to run faster and more efficiently. Pricing has therefore, in many cases, particularly those at the more expensive end, fallen, as these countries have the most room to offer better services more cheaply than they once did.
In this 2020-2021 iteration of the study, connectivity continues to be at its most expensive in the developing and island nations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and Central and South America, with Turkmenistan, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Samoa, Ghana, Macau, Comoros, Mauritania and Eritrea forming the ten most expensive countries in the world.
Typically, though not exclusively, where broadband is expensive, it is also slow and unreliable. The opposite is also largely true, although there are exceptions in both cases.
There were 24 countries or territories in total excluded from this study. The largest cluster of these appears in Central and West Africa, with Benin, Congo, Central African Republic, Western Sahara, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Chad, and Uganda all failing either to offer any qualifying broadband packages, or to release pricing information upon request. A full list of excluded countries – including the reasoning behind exclusion – can be found in both the methodology document downloadable at the bottom of this page, and in the third tab of the results themselves.
The United Kingdom fares well on absolute pricing, but offers very poor value
Although the United Kingdom's global rank of 67th place may not seem all that impressive, the UK comes in fourth cheapest of 29 countries in Western Europe, topped by only France, Italy and Portugal.
It must be said, though, that with its comparatively slow, widely available download speeds it does not fare so well on a cost-per-megabit basis. Cost per megabit per month factors the speeds offered to calculate exactly that: The amount each megabit costs on average. Here the UK came in 25th of 29 countries in Western Europe, with an average cost per megabit, per month of USD 1.06 – a far cry from Malta and Sweden – the best value countries in Western Europe – whose cost per megabit per month is only USD 0.12.
