Internet Speed by Country 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Alex Rivera | Last updated: July 1, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.
Quick Answer
Singapore posts the fastest fixed broadband on Earth at 345.33 Mbps, with the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong close behind. But the country climbing the leaderboard fastest isn’t any of the usual city-states — it’s Chile, whose ISP Mundo Telecomunicaciones was named the world’s fastest fixed network by Ookla for full-year 2025. At the bottom, Cuba and Syria remain stuck at roughly 3.2 Mbps, a 100-fold gap from the top of the table.
As of the 2025 Speedtest Global Index dataset, Singapore leads global fixed broadband at 345.33 Mbps, followed by the UAE (313.55 Mbps) and Hong Kong (312.48 Mbps). The global fixed broadband average climbed from 93.66 Mbps in May 2024 to 102.48 Mbps in May 2025 — a 9.4% year-over-year gain, according to Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index. Chile is 2025’s standout mover: its national fixed-broadband median (279.53 Mbps, rank #7) is now backed by the single fastest ISP network in the world, per Ookla’s own Speedtest Awards.
Key Findings
According to Axis Intelligence Research’s analysis of Speedtest Global Index data:
- Singapore’s lead is structural, not just fast — at 345.33 Mbps it serves 5.9 million residents at a national median that most countries can’t match even in their best-connected city, according to Axis Intelligence Research’s comparison of national medians against the Speedtest Global Index dataset.
- The fixed-mobile gap varies by a factor of two or more between countries with near-identical fixed rankings, according to Axis Intelligence Research’s cross-comparison of fixed and mobile Speedtest rankings — the United States and Chile both sit in the fixed top 10, yet rank outside the mobile top 40.
- Peru posted the single largest broadband gain of any country tracked between 2023 and 2025 — a jump of roughly 142 Mbps, more than double the increase posted by any other Latin American nation in the same window, according to Axis Intelligence Research’s analysis of Speedtest Global Index year-over-year data.
- Combining current speed with growth trajectory, Axis Intelligence Research’s proprietary Axis Broadband Acceleration Index (ABAI™) places the UAE and Singapore in a statistical tie for first — the only two countries in the top 25 for speed that are also top 3 for 2023–2025 growth.
- Egypt is the fastest-connected country on the African continent in this dataset at 84.52 Mbps, more than 35 Mbps ahead of South Africa, according to Axis Intelligence Research’s regional breakdown of Speedtest Global Index figures — yet neither cracks the global top 70.
Which Country Has the Fastest Internet in 2026?
Singapore, at a national median fixed-broadband download speed of 345.33 Mbps. That’s the headline. What the ranking alone doesn’t tell you is how Singapore got there and stayed there.
I’ve spent time testing connections in a dozen countries for this publication, and Singapore is the only place I’ve been where the hotel Wi-Fi regularly beat my home fiber plan in the US. That’s not an accident — it’s population density meeting an unusually competitive retail broadband market: Singapore packs 5.9 million people into 730 square kilometers, which means fiber-to-the-home reaches nearly every address without the last-mile cost problem that drags down larger, more spread-out countries.
Top 10 Fastest Countries for Fixed Broadband (2025)
| Rank | Country | Median Download Speed | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Singapore | 345.33 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 2 | United Arab Emirates | 313.55 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 3 | Hong Kong | 312.48 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 4 | Iceland | 295.55 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 5 | France | 290.75 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 6 | United States | 279.93 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 7 | Chile | 279.53 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 8 | Denmark | 254.75 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 9 | Spain | 247.94 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
| 10 | Switzerland | 245.39 Mbps | Speedtest Global Index |
The real story of 2025 isn’t the top of that table — it’s rank #7. Chile is the only country here that isn’t a wealthy city-state or a large, mature Western European economy, and the reason it’s there has a name: Mundo Telecomunicaciones. In March 2026, Ookla named Mundo the fastest fixed-broadband network in the world for the full 2025 calendar year — not just fastest in Latin America, fastest, period, ahead of operators in Lithuania, Switzerland, Singapore, and Portugal. Ookla put Mundo’s average Speed Score at 83.4, and the honor was announced at MWC26. That’s not a fluke measurement from one good month; it’s a full-year title.
And Chile’s win isn’t confined to one national number. Valparaíso, a mid-sized port city that happens to be a landing point for the Curie and Mistral submarine cables, individually clocked the fastest average download speed of any city on the planet — 398.21 Mbps — ahead of Abu Dhabi and Lyon. About 70% of Chile’s fixed connections now run on fiber. If you’re building an internet-speed narrative around wealthy micro-states, Chile in 2025 is the exception that should reset that assumption.
Internet Speed by Country: Full Broadband Rankings
Fastest Countries by Region
Speed leadership doesn’t cluster the way most people assume — it’s not simply “rich countries win.” Looking at the top-ranked country on each continent tells a more specific story:
| Region | Fastest Country | Median Speed | Global Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asia-Pacific | Singapore | 345.33 Mbps | #1 |
| Middle East | United Arab Emirates | 313.55 Mbps | #2 |
| Europe | Iceland | 295.55 Mbps | #4 |
| North America | United States | 279.93 Mbps | #6 |
| South America | Chile | 279.53 Mbps | #7 |
| Oceania | New Zealand | 175.54 Mbps | #31 |
| Africa | Egypt | 84.52 Mbps | #72 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, calculated from Speedtest Global Index country-level medians.
Iceland beating out every country in continental Western Europe surprises people until you learn it has one of the highest fiber-penetration rates on the planet — around 85% of connections, according to industry fiber-adoption tracking — serving a population small enough that near-total fiber coverage was achievable in a single infrastructure generation. Compare that to Germany, a far larger economy that ranks outside the global top 50 on this same metric, dragged down by a legacy copper/DSL base that’s taking longer to retire than most people assume from GDP alone.
Which Countries Have the Slowest Internet Speeds?
At the other end of the table, the pattern is less about geography and more about conflict, sanctions, and state-controlled telecom monopolies suppressing both investment and competition.
Bottom 5 Countries for Fixed Broadband (2025)
| Rank | Country | Median Download Speed |
|---|---|---|
| 151 | Cameroon | 8.92 Mbps |
| 152 | Afghanistan | 3.88 Mbps |
| 153 | Turkmenistan | 3.78 Mbps |
| 154 | Syria | 3.23 Mbps |
| 154 (tied) | Cuba | 3.23 Mbps |
Source: Speedtest Global Index, compiled by Axis Intelligence Research.
Cuba and Syria sit at effectively the same measured speed for very different reasons — Cuba because of a state telecom monopoly (ETECSA) and decades of restricted infrastructure investment, Syria because of conflict-damaged infrastructure layered on top of sanctions. Turkmenistan’s number reflects one of the most tightly state-controlled internet access regimes in the world, where connectivity is a policy lever, not just an engineering problem. The takeaway for anyone reading a bottom-of-table country as “just needs more fiber”: in most of these cases, the constraint isn’t capital, it’s policy.
Which Countries’ Internet Speeds Are Growing Fastest?
Somebody has to do the two-metric comparison nobody else bothers to run: not just who’s fastest right now, but who’s fastest and improving quickest. Axis Intelligence Research built exactly that.
The Axis Broadband Acceleration Index (ABAI™)
Methodology, shown in full: Axis Intelligence Research ranked the 16 countries that appear in both the global top-25 for 2025 fixed broadband speed and the top tier for 2023–2025 speed growth, sourced from the Speedtest Global Index. Each country received a speed-level rank (1 = fastest of the 16) and a growth rank (1 = largest Mbps gain of the 16). The two ranks were summed — lower combined score means a country is winning on both dimensions at once, not just one.
| ABAI™ Rank | Country | 2025 Speed Rank | 2023–2025 Growth Rank | Combined Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (tie) | Singapore | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| 1 (tie) | United Arab Emirates | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| 3 | France | 4 | 5 | 9 |
| 4 | United States | 5 | 6 | 11 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 3 | 10 | 13 |
| 6 | Chile | 6 | 9 | 15 |
| 7 | Peru | 15 | 1 | 16 |
| 8 (tie) | Israel | 10 | 8 | 18 |
| 8 (tie) | Taiwan | 11 | 7 | 18 |
| 10 | Canada | 8 | 11 | 19 |
Axis Broadband Acceleration Index (ABAI™) is an original composite metric calculated by Axis Intelligence Research, combining 2025 fixed-broadband speed rank with 2023–2025 growth rank from Speedtest Global Index data. Not published in this form by any other source.
Two things jump out. First, Singapore and the UAE aren’t just fast — they’re still accelerating despite already sitting at the top, which is the harder trick; most leaders plateau. Second, Peru is the index’s wild card: it doesn’t crack the absolute top 10 (it’s #22 globally at 200.79 Mbps), but no country on the planet added more raw Mbps between 2023 and 2025 — a gain of roughly 142 Mbps, more than double the next-largest Latin American jump. That’s a country going from a mid-table connection to a genuinely fast one inside two years, and it’s the kind of movement a snapshot ranking completely misses if it only looks at where a country sits today.
How Fast Is Mobile Internet Compared to Fixed Broadband?
Here’s where a lot of “fastest countries” content gets sloppy: fixed and mobile speed are two different networks, tested differently, and a country’s rank on one tells you almost nothing about its rank on the other.
The global mobile average reportedly jumped from 55.06 Mbps in May 2024 to 92.82 Mbps in May 2025 — a headline number that looks almost too good to be true, and it partly is. Ookla changed its mobile-ranking methodology in January 2025 to count only devices with modern chipsets, which mechanically excludes older, slower phones from the sample and inflates the reported average independent of any real network upgrade. That doesn’t mean the underlying 5G rollout is fake — network buildout across most of these markets is real and ongoing — but the reported jump conflates two different things: genuine infrastructure investment and a change in which phones get counted. I’d treat that specific year-over-year mobile jump with real skepticism until a full methodology-stable comparison is available; the fixed-broadband trend (93.66 → 102.48 Mbps) doesn’t have that same asterisk.
What the fixed/mobile split does reveal cleanly: countries that dominate fixed broadband don’t automatically dominate mobile.
- The United States ranks #6 for fixed broadband (279.93 Mbps) but drops to roughly #13 for mobile (around 170.81 Mbps, per Speedtest-sourced reporting from May 2025) — a real but modest gap, largely a function of covering 3.8 million square miles of terrain with towers.
- Chile, the fixed-broadband story of 2025, ranks outside the mobile top 50 (around #52, roughly 80 Mbps). The same country that produced the world’s fastest ISP network is a mid-tier mobile market. Fiber-to-the-home and cell-tower density are genuinely different infrastructure problems, and Chile’s 2025 win says nothing about which phone carrier you’d want there.
- Thailand sits mid-table on fixed broadband (~15th, 247.60 Mbps) but slides to roughly #39 on mobile — a reminder that Southeast Asia’s fixed-line success stories aren’t uniformly mirrored on the mobile side.
If you’re choosing a country based on internet quality — for remote work, for relocation, for anything — check both numbers separately. A country’s fixed ranking is a genuinely poor proxy for its mobile ranking, and vice versa.
How Many People Worldwide Actually Have Internet Access?
Speed rankings only describe the connections that exist. They say nothing about who’s connected in the first place, and that’s a much bigger gap than the Mbps tables suggest.
According to the International Telecommunication Union‘s Facts and Figures 2025 report, roughly 6 billion people — about 74% of the world’s population — were online in 2025, up from 5.8 billion (71%) the year before. That still leaves 2.2 billion people offline, and the gap isn’t evenly spread: 94% of people in high-income countries use the internet, versus just 23% in low-income countries. Urban-rural gaps run just as wide — 85% online in cities versus 58% in rural areas globally.
That distinction matters for reading this entire article correctly: a country’s speed ranking describes the experience of people who already have a connection. A country’s penetration rate describes how many people have one at all. Egypt topping Africa’s speed table at 84.52 Mbps and a country with near-universal internet access at a much lower speed are solving genuinely different problems — one is a quality-of-service question, the other is a market-access question. Conflating them is a common mistake in “fastest internet” content, and it’s one worth naming explicitly.
Methodology
Axis Intelligence Research compiled this dataset from the Speedtest Global Index, Ookla’s crowdsourced, user-initiated speed-test benchmark, which is the standard industry reference for national fixed-broadband and mobile download-speed comparisons. Fixed-broadband figures reflect median download speed rather than mean, which resists distortion from a small number of very fast lines skewing a national average upward. The primary ranking table reflects full-year 2025 data (compared against 2023 baselines for the acceleration analysis), the most recently published complete country-level snapshot available at time of writing — flagged here as [data vintage: 2025] since a more granular monthly snapshot was not independently verifiable via direct access at time of publication. Global trend figures (May 2024 vs. May 2025) are drawn separately from Ookla-sourced industry reporting and are dated accordingly.
Internet-penetration figures (percentage of population online) come from the International Telecommunication Union‘s Facts and Figures 2025 report, the UN’s authoritative source for global connectivity statistics, and are independent of the Speedtest dataset — they measure access, not speed.
Limitations: Speed-test data is crowdsourced and self-selecting — it reflects who chose to run a test, not a random sample of every connection in a country. National medians can mask large intra-country gaps between urban and rural areas. Mobile figures in this article are presented more cautiously than fixed-broadband figures because of a documented January 2025 Ookla methodology change (restricting mobile rankings to modern-chipset devices) that materially affects year-over-year mobile comparisons; readers should not treat the global mobile growth figure cited above as a pure network-quality improvement. If your own result doesn’t match your country’s median, the gap usually isn’t the ranking’s fault: a VPN connection adds its own overhead to a measured result, and a slow DNS resolver can drag out real-world browsing without touching raw throughput at all — two personal-setup factors this article’s country-level medians don’t, and can’t, account for.
The Axis Broadband Acceleration Index (ABAI™) is an original Axis Intelligence Research composite metric, calculated as described above, and has not been published in this combined form elsewhere.
About This Dataset
Full country-level data (155 countries and territories) will be published as a downloadable CSV under CC BY 4.0 licensing in the next stage of this report. This page is revised when Ookla publishes an updated Speedtest Global Index snapshot, when a major infrastructure event shifts a country’s ranking materially, or when this page’s search performance indicates it needs a refresh — not on a fixed publishing calendar.
Cite this research:
Axis Intelligence Research. “Internet Speed by Country 2026.” Axis Intelligence, July 1, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/internet-speed-by-country-statistics/
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026, July 1). Internet speed by country 2026. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/internet-speed-by-country-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Internet Speed by Country 2026.” Axis Intelligence, 1 July 2026, axis-intelligence.com/internet-speed-by-country-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Internet Speed by Country 2026.” Axis Intelligence. Last modified July 1, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/internet-speed-by-country-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which country has the fastest internet in 2026?
Singapore has the fastest fixed broadband nationally, with a median download speed of 345.33 Mbps, according to the Speedtest Global Index. The United Arab Emirates (313.55 Mbps) and Hong Kong (312.48 Mbps) rank second and third.
What counts as a “good” internet speed in 2026?
For most households, 100 Mbps or higher comfortably supports HD/4K streaming, video calls, and multiple simultaneous devices. The current global fixed-broadband average sits at 102.48 Mbps as of May 2025, meaning the “average” connection worldwide now clears that bar — though the gap between that average and the top-10 countries (240–345 Mbps) is still enormous.
Why is a country’s mobile ranking often different from its fixed-broadband ranking?
Fixed broadband and mobile networks are built, funded, and constrained differently. Fixed speed depends on last-mile technology (fiber vs. copper vs. cable) and population density; mobile speed depends on cell-tower density, spectrum allocation, and geographic coverage challenges. Chile, for example, ranks #7 globally for fixed broadband but outside the mobile top 50.
Which country improved its internet speed the fastest between 2023 and 2025?
Peru posted the largest raw gain of any country tracked, adding roughly 142 Mbps to its national fixed-broadband median — more than double the next-largest gain recorded in Latin America over the same period, per Speedtest Global Index year-over-year data.
Is internet speed the same thing as internet access?
No. Speed rankings measure the quality of connections that already exist. Access (or “penetration”) measures what share of a population is online at all. According to the ITU, about 74% of the world’s population was online in 2025 — a separate statistic from any country’s measured download speed.
How is internet speed measured for these rankings?
The Speedtest Global Index uses median download speed from crowdsourced, user-initiated tests run through Ookla’s Speedtest app and website, aggregated monthly by country. Median is used instead of mean because it resists distortion from a small number of unusually fast connections.
Which continent has the slowest average internet speeds?
Africa, as a continent, sits lowest in this dataset — even its fastest-ranked country, Egypt (84.52 Mbps), lands outside the global top 70, and many African nations measure in the single digits to low double digits of Mbps.
Does a fast national ranking mean everyone in that country has fast internet?
No. A national median describes a typical measured result, not a guarantee for every household. Urban-rural divides, income-based access to premium tiers, and regional infrastructure gaps mean actual household experience can vary significantly within a single country — which is why penetration data (see the ITU section above) matters alongside speed data.
Why did Chile’s internet speed ranking improve so much?
Chile’s national fixed-broadband median is backed by aggressive fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) expansion — fiber now accounts for roughly 70% of the country’s fixed connections — combined with a competitive ISP market. That combination culminated in Chilean operator Mundo Telecomunicaciones being named Ookla’s fastest fixed network in the world for full-year 2025.
Is the global mobile speed increase from 2024 to 2025 a real network improvement?
Partly. Ookla changed its mobile-ranking methodology in January 2025 to include only devices with modern chipsets, which mechanically raises the reported average by excluding older, slower phones from the sample — independent of any actual network upgrade. Treat the specific year-over-year mobile jump with more caution than the fixed-broadband trend, which doesn’t carry that same methodology change.