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by Andrey Popov (main author) and Simon Lumb (technical data)
Across many markets, there is often a striking gap between the broadband speeds users are promised and the speeds they actually experience. The biggest factor behind this disconnect is the in-home Wi-Fi environment.
In this insight, we look at the percentage of households in a country achieving specific broadband speed levels, based on real-world measurements taken from users’ devices. Unlike operators’ and regulators’ reported data on speed tier adoption, these indicators reflect the entire delivery path, from content source to household to device, offering a more accurate and comprehensive picture of a country’s broadband landscape.
Key Findings
- In Spain, only around half (56%) of our broadband users measured device speeds equal or above 100Mbps on their home Wi-Fi. This is despite near universal access to fiber and gigabit speed connections, which together with cable represented 96% of connections in Q1 2025. Spain is therefore one of the stark examples where high-speed infrastructure fails to translate into equivalent presence of high-speed broadband experience on home networks.
- The U.S. and Canada lead with fastest broadband experience indicators among the 14 analyzed markets. Supported by a wide install base of advanced in-home Wi-Fi setups and high investments in access infrastructure, over half of users in the U.S. (55%) and nearly half in Canada (47%) recorded speeds equal or above 250Mbps on their home Wi-Fi — ahead of other major broadband markets analyzed in this report.
- Wi-Fi home gateways are frequently a limiting factor — and in a number of markets a relatively low share of households achieve negotiated Wi-Fi link speeds of 100Mbps, such as in Brazil (62%), Mexico (57%) and Indonesia (35%). Modern gateways perform much better, as Wi-Fi 5 represents a major leap in performance over older standards yet a significant share of users still rely on older equipment. Emerging markets particularly struggling with outdated in-home setups — where we see Wi-Fi forming a bottleneck to high-speed experience.
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