The UK took a different approach to most other countries; and IMO was the correct one. Something like 98% of properties could get at least 30meg (via VDSL2, actually more likely to be closer to 80mbit) down, and this has been the case for nearly a decade. 50% of homes have always been able to get much faster speeds via DOCSIS cable from VM (though I will caveat with that that until VM enabled DOCSIS3.1 across their network recently it could be very hit and miss congestion wise).
In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.
The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.
So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.
Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.
In the past few years though there has been an explosion in FTTH build. 75% properties can get gigabit service now which is increasing by around about 1% every month.
The priority a decade ago really was on getting the entire country up to 'usable' internet speeds, rather than having a lot of FTTH in some areas and then very slow DSL in many other areas. Only 0.35% of UK properties are below 2mbit/sec down now (unusable), which doesn't include 4G/5G coverage, so in reality it's likely only 1 in 1000 households have utterly terrible connectivity.
So while the UK doesn't rank top of the list of median download speeds it is far less likely you are going to have bad connectivity, which IMO is a greater priority than raw download speeds.
Very few people actually need more than say 100mbit/sec day to day. It's actually hard to get gigabit around the house; most powerline adaptors and wifi solutions top out around 300mbit/sec in my experience, so unless you have ethernet in your house (very rare), the limiting factor is now on in home connectivity, not the external ISP.