Summary

  • BEREC’s cross-country price series chiefly covers 2019–2022 and four comparators; its Speedtest quality trends run through 2024 across a different five-jurisdiction set.
  • The report does contain a matched 2022 price-and-quality comparison. It supports a dated, multidimensional reading of value, not a single current ranking.
  • The consultation record shows why the measurement window matters: stakeholders use the same indicators to argue about investment and market scale, claims that the scorecard alone cannot settle.

The headline has a measurement window

“Good value for money” is a compact phrase for a broad conclusion. BEREC’s fact-finding report reaches it by bringing together prices, download and upload speeds, latency, coverage, investment and market structure. Those indicators do not all describe the same year, country set or user experience.

For its main cross-border price comparisons, BEREC extracts 2019–2022 data from the European Commission’s Mobile and Fixed Broadband Prices in Europe studies. The prices are adjusted for local purchasing power and the comparator set is the EU, the United States, South Korea and Japan. The US tariff observations come from California, Colorado and New York. They are not a census of every American offer.

The quality charts use Ookla Speedtest averages for fixed and mobile download speed, upload speed and latency from 2019 through 2024. They cover the EU, the US, South Korea, Japan and China. Most observations are consumer-initiated tests measured at end-user devices. That makes them evidence about measured experience among people running tests, not a technical maximum or a direct reading of every subscriber’s service.

The two series are therefore related, but they are not one synchronized 2026 household score. There is an important qualification: BEREC also makes a direct comparison using reliably available 2022 price and quality data, and separately discusses later EU prices. Its report says EU prices continued to fall after 2022, with EU-only observations for 2023 and 2024, and cites a later US–EU estimate. Those additions extend the price story for Europe; they do not turn the underlying international tariff sample into a comparable 2026 dataset.

What the matched 2022 comparison shows

The 2022 cross-section is still informative. For fixed broadband, BEREC reports EU average download speeds about 40% below the US, but upload speeds 8% higher and latency 38% shorter, alongside fixed-internet prices at roughly half the US level. The report warns that some quality measures move more quickly: by 2024, US upload performance had overtaken the EU figure.

For mobile, the EU’s 2022 average download speed was about 35% lower than the US figure. Upload performance was faster, latency 26% shorter, and prices roughly one-third to one-half of US prices. Across both technologies, the conclusion changes with the dimension selected. Price, download speed, upload speed and latency each answer a different question.

Purchasing-power adjustment helps compare price levels across economies, but it does not tell a household whether a specific bundle fits its income, location or usage. Speedtest averages likewise do not show the distribution within every country. BEREC’s own report notes that comparisons can be constrained by differences in data definitions and reporting. Its value-for-money conclusion is best read as a structured comparison of available evidence, with limits attached.

Why the consultation made the boundary political

The consultation outcome records a disagreement over interpretation. CE/GSMA argued that the draft relied too heavily on short-term consumer price indicators and gave too little weight to investment capacity, network quality and long-term competitiveness. Other respondents supported a consistent international comparison or asked for more disaggregation. These are stakeholder positions, not measurements produced by the report.

BEREC’s companion report discusses consolidation separately. It says the available evidence does not clearly establish that greater scale in Europe would translate into higher investment, innovation and competitiveness. That does not show that scale can never create efficiencies, nor does it decide any individual merger. It does mean that neither “prices are low” nor “average downloads trail the leaders” is, by itself, a causal case for or against consolidation.

The practical question is what evidence a decision-maker would need next: comparable country prices for the same year and service baskets; quality measures with their test populations and distributions visible; and investment outcomes tied to identifiable market changes. Without that chain, a dated comparison can be recruited into a current policy argument it was not designed to resolve.

Sources