Internet Speed by Country: 2026 Fixed and Mobile Rankings

A 10 GB game update lands in about three minutes on a typical home line in Singapore and takes more than four hours in Afghanistan. That gap, more than a hundredfold, is what “internet speed by country” really measures. On Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index for March 2026, Singapore had the fastest median fixed broadband download at 425.46 Mbps and the United Arab Emirates had the fastest median mobile download at 644.66 Mbps, while Cuba (3.83 Mbps fixed) and Eritrea (4.75 Mbps mobile) sat at the bottom, according to the country list compiled from the index.

Rankings move every month. By September 2026, Statista’s summary of the index put Singapore at 462.5 Mbps fixed, with the UAE second on 382.4 Mbps. The full table further down uses the March 2026 edition so that every country is measured in the same month, and the upload and latency figures come from Ookla’s May 2026 release.

Fastest and Slowest Internet Speed by Country in 2026

Fixed broadband means the connection into a home or office: fibre, cable, DSL or fixed wireless. Mobile means phones and tablets on 4G and 5G. Ookla ranks them separately, and the two leaderboards look nothing alike.

Top 10 Countries for Fixed Broadband

Small, dense, wealthy places dominate. Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau are cities, and running fibre to apartment towers is cheap per home. Chile is the outlier worth watching: it was 6th in March and had already topped Ookla’s fixed table in an earlier edition, the clearest sign that a middle-income country can build a world-class wired network.

Bottom 10 Countries for Fixed Broadband

Top 10 Countries for Mobile Internet

The Gulf owns the top of the mobile table. The UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain take the first four places, and the UAE’s median phone connection was about 1.7 times faster than its own median home line in March. Brazil in 5th is the surprise for many readers, ahead of South Korea.

Bottom 10 Countries for Mobile Internet

Ookla’s mobile list is shorter than its fixed list: 105 countries against 153 in March 2026. Several of the slowest fixed-line markets, including Ethiopia, Cuba and Yemen, do not appear on the mobile table at all.

India, US, UK and UAE Internet Speed Rankings Compared

These four markets account for most of Bizolaunch’s readers, and each tells a different story.

• UAE: first for mobile and second for fixed on Ookla, a rare double. Yet on the M-Lab league it ranks only 43rd. That gap (Ookla’s fixed median is almost four times M-Lab’s mean) is the biggest of the four and is explained in the methodology section below.
• United States: 8th on fixed, helped by fibre and gigabit cable plans. The weak point is upload. In May 2026 the US fixed median upload was 57.5 Mbps against a 306.86 Mbps download, per ISPreview’s table of Ookla data, so Americans upload at under a fifth of their download speed.
• United Kingdom: the UK sat 44th for fixed and 59th for mobile in Ookla’s November 2025 figures, and its fixed median rose from 117.49 Mbps to 147.35 Mbps in a year, according to ISPreview’s year-on-year comparison. Mobile is the laggard: 75.91 Mbps in March 2026, below Morocco and Armenia.
• India: the most lopsided profile in the table. A median phone connection of 126.73 Mbps is more than double the 60.85 Mbps median home line. That is the 5G effect, covered further down.

Internet Speed by Country: Full Table of 104 Countries

Every country that appears on both of Ookla’s March 2026 lists, sorted by fixed broadband median download. The mobile rank lets you spot countries where phones beat home lines at a glance.

Another 49 countries appear on the fixed list only, including Iceland (347.30 Mbps, 5th), Macau (318.05 Mbps, 7th), Jamaica (86.55 Mbps), Nepal (84.34 Mbps), Ghana (49.64 Mbps) and Ethiopia (11.17 Mbps). Eritrea appears on the mobile list only, last at 4.75 Mbps.

Two patterns stand out. The median country on the fixed list (Czech Republic, 92.71 Mbps) and the median country on the mobile list (Italy, 92.81 Mbps) are almost identical, so for a “typical” nation phones and home lines are now neck and neck. And 67 of the 153 fixed-line countries clear 100 Mbps at the median, while 18 are below 25 Mbps.

Upload Speed and Latency by Country, the Numbers Rankings Hide

Ookla ranks countries on download speed alone. For anyone working from home, upload and latency matter just as much: upload governs how you look on a video call and how long a backup takes, and latency decides whether a game or a remote desktop feels sluggish. The May 2026 index shows how differently countries with similar download speeds behave.

France and the US had almost the same download median in May 2026. France’s upload was nearly five times higher. When upload sits close to download, as in France, Spain, Ecuador and Norway, that is a strong sign most tests run over fibre, which carries equal or near-equal speeds in both directions. When upload is a fifth or less of download, as in the US, the UK, Australia, Belgium and Germany, a large share of homes still use cable or copper, which are built for downloading.

Latency is mostly a non-issue on wired lines in rich countries: 5 to 13 ms across the European and American entries. DR Congo’s 143 ms median stands apart, the kind of figure usually seen when traffic travels long distances or through congested links. Globally, Ookla’s November 2025 medians were 9 ms for fixed and 25 ms for mobile, with median uploads of 56.95 Mbps and 13.23 Mbps respectively, according to ISPreview.

Why Ookla, M-Lab and Cable.co.uk Rank Countries Differently

Search “fastest internet in the world” and you will find Singapore on one list and Iceland on another. Both can be right, because the two big datasets measure different things.

• Median versus mean: a median is the middle test, so a few gigabit users do not pull it up and a few broken lines do not drag it down. A mean is pulled by both. In a country where a minority has very fast fibre and a long tail sits on slow copper, the two numbers can be far apart.
• One connection versus many: the M-Lab test measures what a single TCP stream can carry, which the Cable.co.uk methodology calls bulk transport capacity rather than the maximum capacity of the line. On a fast fibre plan, one stream often cannot fill the pipe, while Ookla’s results on the same kind of line come out far higher. That is one likely reason the UAE’s Ookla figure is almost four times its M-Lab figure.
• Who presses the button: both are crowdsourced. People run a speed test when something feels wrong, or when they have just bought a fast plan and want to see it. ISPreview’s write-up of the M-Lab league notes that users with problems are more likely to test. Cable.co.uk filters out tests with obvious faults and drops countries with fewer than 100 distinct IP addresses.
• Small-sample swings: monthly medians in small markets can jump. The Maldives sat at 36.72 Mbps fixed in early 2026 and was reported at 675.02 Mbps by May, according to SlashGear’s reading of the index. Treat any single month for a small country with care.

Our view: use Ookla for current, like-for-like comparisons and for upload and latency, and use the M-Lab league as a sense check on what an ordinary single download (a file from a website, say) achieves. India is the one market where the two broadly agree (60.85 Mbps median versus 65.51 Mbps mean), which suggests its fixed-line users are clustered at similar plan speeds.

Fibre, 5G and Starlink: What Moves a Country Up the Table

Full Fibre (FTTH) Lifts Fixed Rankings

The upload table is the quickest outside test of a country’s fibre-to-the-home footprint: France and Spain, with median uploads near 80% of download, sit 5th and 17th on the May 2026 fixed list. The UK is a live case of fibre build-out feeding through to speed. Ofcom figures quoted by ISPreview show full fibre (FTTP) gigabit coverage rising from 69% to 78% of UK premises in a year, and gigabit-capable coverage from 84% to 87%. Over the same 12 months, the UK’s Ookla fixed median rose about 25%, while its upload jumped from 30.28 Mbps to 45.07 Mbps. Coverage is not the same as take-up, though, which is why the UK still ranks in the 40s.

5G Rewrote the Mobile Table

India is the textbook case. Its median mobile download went from 13.87 Mbps in September 2022, just before 5G launched on 1 October 2022, to 50.21 Mbps in August 2023, roughly 3.6 times faster, and the country climbed 72 places to 47th, Ookla data reported by The Tribune show. By March 2026 the median had reached 126.73 Mbps and 37th place. Globally, the median mobile download rose 58% in a single year, from 59.15 Mbps in November 2024 to 93.47 Mbps in November 2025, against a 13% rise for fixed.

That explains the 42 countries where phones now beat home lines. Many are markets where mobile investment has outrun fixed-line build-out: India, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Pakistan. Gulf states appear for a different reason. Their mobile networks are simply extraordinarily fast.

Starlink Fills Gaps but Rarely Moves National Medians

Satellite broadband serves rural homes that fibre will not reach for years, but it is a small slice of national tests. In the US, Ookla’s analysis of the second half of 2025 found Starlink’s median download at 100 Mbps or more in every state except Alaska, and its median upload at 20 Mbps or more in 22 states, up from none a year earlier, Telecompetitor reported in May 2026. Only 44.7% of Starlink users got 100/20 Mbps service in both directions in Q4 2025. By the official numbers above, that is comfortably enough for 4K streaming and video calls in most of the US.

Speeds Needed for 4K Streaming, Video Calls and Cloud Backup

A national median only matters against what you actually do online. These are the official minimums from the services themselves.

Measured against these numbers, streaming is a solved problem in most of the world. At 15 Mbps per 4K stream, India’s median fixed line (60.85 Mbps) can carry four at once, the global median (106.84 Mbps, November 2025) seven, and the UK’s March 2026 median eleven. Only five countries on the fixed list fall below 15 Mbps at the median (Libya, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria and Cuba), with Pakistan just above the line at 17.90 Mbps.

Video calls are a question of upload. A single 1080p Zoom group call needs 3.8 Mbps up, trivial on fibre, yet a household with three people on calls at once needs over 11 Mbps of upload, which the global mobile median of 13.23 Mbps barely covers. If your desk is far from the router, the bottleneck may be the Wi-Fi rather than the line; our explainer on what Wi-Fi 7 changes covers when a router upgrade helps.

How Long a 10 GB Download Takes at Each Country’s Median

We ran the arithmetic in Python. A 10 GB file is 80,000 megabits (10 × 8 × 1,000), and time equals size divided by speed. These are best-case figures at a steady median speed with no protocol overhead, so real downloads will run somewhat longer.

Uploads are where the gaps really hurt. Backing up 100 GB of photos or project files at the May 2026 fixed upload medians takes about 48 minutes in France (276.67 Mbps), 3 hours 52 minutes in the US (57.5 Mbps), 3 hours 56 minutes in the UK (56.57 Mbps), 5 hours 55 minutes in Germany (37.55 Mbps) and just over 8 hours in Belgium (27.6 Mbps). On the global mobile upload median of 13.23 Mbps, the same backup would run for almost 17 hours. A business moving to cloud storage should check upload, not download, before signing a contract. To work out percentage differences between any two speeds in these tables, our percentage calculator does it in one step.

Using Country Speed Data to Plan Remote Teams and Offices

• Hiring remote staff abroad: any country above roughly 25 Mbps fixed at the median will handle HD video calls and normal SaaS work for a typical worker. Where the country also shows a low latency median and an upload above the 3.8 Mbps Zoom asks for in 1080p group calls, calls should hold up. For time-zone overlap, pair this with our time zone converter.
• Opening an office: national medians mix cities and villages. A business district in a capital city can beat the national figure by a wide margin, and a rural site can fall well short of it. Use the median to judge the country, then test the actual building.
• Countries where mobile wins: in India, Indonesia, Kenya and the other 39 countries where phones beat home lines, a 5G router can be a credible primary or backup link for a small office.
• Heavy upload work: video editors, architects and anyone syncing large files should prefer fibre markets with a high upload share, such as France, Spain, Ecuador or Norway in the May 2026 data.

More explainers on connectivity and hardware sit in our Technology section.

Common Questions About Global Internet Speeds

Which Country Has the Fastest Internet in the World?

On Ookla’s index, Singapore has the fastest fixed broadband (425.46 Mbps median in March 2026, 462.5 Mbps by September 2026) and the UAE has the fastest mobile internet (644.66 Mbps in March 2026). On the M-Lab league, which uses averages, Iceland was first for fixed at 279.55 Mbps in the year to June 2024.

Which Country Has the Slowest Internet?

Cuba had the slowest fixed broadband median on Ookla’s March 2026 list at 3.83 Mbps, just behind Syria (4.24 Mbps) and Afghanistan (4.93 Mbps). Eritrea was last for mobile at 4.75 Mbps.

What Is India’s Rank in Internet Speed?

In March 2026 India ranked 101st of 153 countries for fixed broadband (60.85 Mbps median) and 37th of 105 for mobile (126.73 Mbps). Mobile is faster because of the 5G rollout that began in October 2022.

Where Does the US Rank for Internet Speed?

The US was 8th for fixed broadband (309.80 Mbps) and 10th for mobile (213.29 Mbps) in March 2026, and 9th for fixed in May 2026. Its fixed upload median of 57.5 Mbps is far below fibre-led countries such as France.

Is 100 Mbps Fast Enough for a Home or Small Office?

For downloads, yes: it carries six 4K Netflix streams at 15 Mbps each and matches the FCC’s 100 Mbps download benchmark. Check the upload too. The FCC benchmark pairs it with 20 Mbps up, and several simultaneous 1080p Zoom calls need about 3.8 Mbps each.

Why Does My Speed Test Differ From My Country’s Median?

The median is the middle of millions of tests on every kind of plan, from basic DSL to gigabit fibre. Your result depends on the plan you pay for, your Wi-Fi, the device and how busy the network is at that moment.

Ookla’s Global Index, Statista and ISPreview Rankings

• Ookla Speedtest Global Index (publisher of the median speed data)
• Wikipedia: List of countries by Internet connection speeds (Ookla March 2026 country lists)
• Statista: fixed internet speed by country, September 2026
• ISPreview: World Cup 2026 countries ranked by fixed broadband speed (Ookla, May 2026)
• ISPreview: 2025 vs 2024 UK broadband and mobile speeds vs the world
• ISPreview: UK ranks 35th of 229 countries (M-Lab and Cable.co.uk, 2024)
• Worldwide broadband speed league 2024 methodology (PDF)
• SlashGear: Speedtest Global Index data, May 2026
• TelecomTV: Chile tops Ookla’s global fixed broadband ranking
• The Tribune: 5G drives India’s speed ranking up 72 places
• Telecompetitor: Starlink nearing full FCC broadband compliance (Ookla)
• Netflix Help Center: recommended internet speeds
• Zoom Video SDK system requirements
• Benton Institute: FCC increases broadband speed benchmark
• Wikipedia: Speedtest.net (test servers and methodology)