Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A recent study by telecom analyst firm Tarifica, which examined the change in fixed broadband ISP pricing between 2023 and 2025 across six major European countries (Italy, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands), has found that prices fell in every country except the UK where they rose by 7.86%.
In fairness, when viewed across a much larger country sample, past studies have tended to indicate that the UK normally does pretty well when it comes to the issue of broadband pricing and affordability. This is often a reflection of our highly competitive market, particularly since the introduction of alternative networks that have driven down pricing to steal market share away from the incumbents of Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media.
The new study claims to have checked the residential packages of “every broadband provider” in each country – those able to offer plans with download speeds of at least 100Mbps with unlimited usage. The results were then sorted into four consumer profiles, separated by download speed – 100Mbps+, 250Mbps+, 500Mbps+ and 1000Mbps+.
The results show that almost all the countries, except the UK, saw a fall in their prices, with Spain, the Netherlands, and France all seeing double-digit drops in their average price (these reductions were seen across every user type). By comparison, the UK was already the third most expensive market in 2023, but with its average price increasing and the declines in price from Germany and the Netherlands, the country ended up ranked as the most expensive for consumer broadband service by Q1 2025.
The increase in the UK is said to have been “driven exclusively by the rise in cost for 1000+Mbps plans“, where the country’s average price is said to have increased by “more than 50%“. For its other offer types, the country did see modest price declines, just “not enough to offset the price increase for these super users“.
The results are somewhat questionable and lead us to suspect that the study may not have actually included the results from “every” ISP as claimed (there are around 200 domestic-focused ISPs in the UK). ISPreview similarly conducted a study of 1Gbps package prices earlier this year (here), which looked at the change from 2022 to 2025 and found that monthly pricing had broadly fallen due to competition; we also made our data public.
In addition, there are a few caveats to consider above, such as with the fact that Tarifica seems to be lending too much weight in their overall average to the perceived increase in 1Gbps pricing. This is an issue because only a small portion of users will actually be adopting 1Gbps tiers, thus the study should ideally be weighting such tiers to have a lower impact on the general average.
The study also noted that only 38% of the UK ISPs sampled actually offered 1Gbps packages (in 2023 this figure was just 25%), which they say compares with c.80-100% in the other countries (where full fibre (FTTP) networks have been around at scale for several years longer). However, the figure of 38% for 2025 is questionable, as most of the ISPs we monitor have already introduced such a tier. We’d be curious to see Tarifica’s data for this.
The other catch is that the study is only considering the prices offered to new customers, which will always benefit from temporary first term discounts and special offers. But since most consumers do tend to remain with their ISP post-contract, at least for a few years, then to get the full picture we’d probably need to examine the higher prices that loyal customers pay too (not an easy thing to do as many ISPs are not transparent about this).
Overall, it’s an interesting piece of research, but one that should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. Pricing is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down and correctly reflect.