The Netherlands and Luxembourg are alone in the lead, while France and Germany come eerily close. In Belgium, Telenet offers the fastest fixed and mobile internet.
Ookla, a popular online tool to test your internet speed, has published the results of Belgian telecom providers. He took a closer look at both fixed and mobile internet and compared it to other European countries. The result: we’re not doing badly, but most of our neighbors are doing better.
For the average internet speed of our fixed internet, we need Switzerland (104.58 Mbps), Spain (101.10 Mbps), the Netherlands (92.20 Mbps), Luxembourg (89.27 Mbps) and France (75.47 Mbps) for us to be tolerant of. Remarkably, the speed has increased quite a bit this year, unlike in most other countries. France was still behind us in the second quarter of 2021, but they have now made little progress.
In terms of mobile internet, we do a little better overall. The Netherlands (84.59 Mbps) comfortably ranks first, followed by Switzerland (71.76 Mbps), Luxembourg (69.81 Mbps) and Austria (49.98 Mbps). Belgium comes in fifth with a rate of 48.88 Mbps, slightly behind France and Germany.
Proximus lowers the numbers
The Ookla numbers also provide insight into how our national telecom service providers are rated, and therefore who is most responsible for the disappointing performance. In terms of mobile internet speeds, Orange is the main culprit with an average download speed of 39.09Mbps. BASE (owned by Telenet) is just above 56.83 Mbps, followed by Telenet (56.73 Mbps) and Proximus (53.38 Mbps).
When we look at the fixed internet, Telenet (124.89Mbps) stands alone while Proximus (43.45Mbps) and Scarlet (35.34Mbps) pull the average down sharply. Proximus, which recently acquired Scarlet, is trying to catch up to replace its old, slow nationwide DSL technology with fiber optics. Together with, among others, Fiberclar, Flanders wants to provide fiber optics to a large extent over the next seven years.
Ookla is also studying the differences between Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Here we see that Wallonia performs significantly worse for both fixed and mobile internet.
Which Flemish province has the highest score?
If we zoom specifically in Flanders, Flemish Brabant (57.47 Mbps) yields the best results in terms of mobile Internet. Antwerp is closely followed by 57.30 Mbps, followed by West Flanders (54.95 Mbps) and East Flanders (52.19 Mbps). Limburg is the only province that has not reached the 50 Mbps mark.
The Limburgers come back when we consider the average download speed on the stable web. It tops the list with 90.07 Mbps, followed by East Flanders (86.68 Mbps), West Flanders (86.45 Mbps), Antwerp (85.23 Mbps) and Flemish Brabant (84.50 Mbps).
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