Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A new Point Topic study of all major standalone and bundled fixed broadband operators and their tariffs across the EU, UK, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland – reflecting a total of 31 countries and 200 operators – has revealed that the United Kingdom ranked a respectable 12th in the table (median average tariffs) and 4th for entry level package tariffs.
The report, which also compared the average subscription charges and corresponding bandwidths for different broadband technologies across Europe, presents the latest tariff benchmarks to the end of March 2025 and also compared them to the same sort of data gathered in December 2024. All prices are quoted in US dollars at PPP (purchasing power parity) rates.
The application of PPP is important because there can be huge differences between countries in terms of things like taxation, size of the state and monthly salaries (i.e. $1 will go many times further in some countries than others). But using PPP allows you to weight against this for a hopefully more balanced comparison.
Overall, older copper-based residential broadband tariffs were found to still be the cheapest ($51 PPP or £41), but on the flip side they also offered the lowest average download speed of 22Mbps, which is up from the previous quarter’s 16Mbps. This helps to underline the importance of “value” to what you pay, which doesn’t really come across all that much in the ranking table itself.
The average monthly tariffs for cable-based (hybrid fibre coax) technologies increased by 2.7% to $65 PPP (£48) up from $63 PPP (£47) at the end of 2024. Fibre-based tariffs (FTTP/B) remained the most expensive of the technology accesses, yet its cost was relatively static at $69 PPP (£51) and you will of course get significantly faster speeds via full fibre lines.
Average cable-based tariff speeds dropped by nearly 11% to reach 544Mbps, although it’s worth noting that many of those providers (e.g. Virgin Media) are in the process of upgrading to faster full fibre networks. Speaking of which, full fibre-based tariffs offered the highest average download speed at 725Mbps, up ever so slightly from 724Mbps in the previous quarter.
However, as hinted above with that mention of “value“, it’s incredibly difficult to produce a true apples-to-apples price comparison between countries and packages because of how much each package can vary in terms of its various service features (e.g. the quality of router bundled, setup/install charges, service speeds, static or dynamic IP addresses, special offers/discounts etc.).
Suffice to say that a table like this can’t reflect everything, although Romania is clearly the country to go for the cheapest fixed broadband tariffs, while Norway and Iceland are currently competing to be the most expensive countries.
ISPreview took a quick look at one ISP in Romania called Digi, which appears to be offering a gigabit (1Gbps) package for a standard price of 80 LEI (excluding discounts), which works out as just £13.25 per month. By comparison, the large Norwegian ISP Altibox appears to be offering the same broadband speed for the equivalent of around £100 per month.
Similar gigabit packages in the UK tend to hover around the £40-£50 mark, albeit with a few networks being a lot cheaper and some being a lot more expensive.
