London ranks last among major world capitals for mobile upload speeds
Key Points
- London ranked last of 19 cities for median mobile upload speed at 11.0 Mbps
- Stockholm led the field at 49.9 Mbps
- London ranked No. 17 for both download speed and latency
- London recorded the worst latency under load of every city tested
- Shared networks and neutral city fibre explain Stockholm’s lead
London has the slowest median mobile upload speed of 19 major cities at 11.0 Mbps, according to the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Ookla.
The GLA and Ookla published the figures in a new joint report, A New Lens on the Connected Capital, which compared London with 18 peer cities using Speedtest data from Q1 2026.
The data shows that Stockholm leads the field on upload speed with a median of 49.9 Mbps, more than four times London’s result.
Only four of the 19 cities cleared the report’s 25 Mbps “Forward-looking” upload benchmark, and London fell well short of it. London also ranked poorly on the other measures in the comparison:
- Median download speed of 103.6 Mbps, ranking No. 17 of 19, behind leader Seoul at 330.1 Mbps
- Median latency of 38.2 ms, ranking No. 17, behind leader Stockholm at 22.9 ms
- Median jitter of 10.2 ms, ranking No. 17, behind leader Stockholm at 5.2 ms
- Latency under load of 2,908 ms at the 90th percentile, ranking No. 19 of 19
- 5G share of tests at 75.5%, ranking No. 10, behind leader Stockholm at 89.1%
The latency-under-load figure means one in ten London download tests ran close to three seconds of delay. Stockholm recorded 736 ms on the same measure, nearly four times faster.
London’s median download speed sat closer to Rome’s 100.0 Mbps than to New York’s 227.3 Mbps.
Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki cleared all three of the report’s Forward-looking checks on download, upload and latency. London cleared only one, on download speed.
The report tied Stockholm’s lead to two structural factors that London lacks at scale. Sweden’s Net4Mobility joint venture between Tele2 and Telenor has shared radio infrastructure across about 99.9% of the population since 2009.
Stockholm also runs Stokab, a neutral city fibre network spanning more than two million fibre kilometres with over a hundred connected operators. London’s mobile networks buy fibre from a more competitive and less coordinated wholesale market.
The dataset covered 1 January to 31 March 2026 and included only non-roaming traffic on Android and iOS devices. The report left Brussels and Tokyo out of this edition because their sample sizes fell below its threshold.
