Mobile Internet Roaming Speeds in Southeast Europe

The company Ookla, well-known for its Speedtest tool for measuring internet speeds, recently published a report regarding LTE networks speeds for roaming users. They compared speeds in domestic networks and roaming around the Europe, and the report was also separately made for Southeast Europe.

The data is a median speeds result taken from over 2.7 million consumer-initiated tests in Southeast Europe during Q1-Q2 2018 on devices using LTE networks. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro are excluded from this analysis due to insufficient sample size during the examined time period. Data for Serbia includes the disputed region of Kosovo. Roaming speeds include Android results only.

Bulgarians have the biggest median speed at domestic networks, 37,97 Mbps, but the speed falls significantly in roaming, over 52 percent, to 18,21 Mbps. Croatia has the second fastest domestic LTE speed of 34,50 Mbps and also the smallest negative difference of just 89,2 percent when roaming. The smallest speed in domestic networks is recorded in Slovenia, 26,26 Mbps, and Slovenia is the only country in the region that has better speeds in roaming +7,6%, 28,26 Mbps).

In terms of median latency, Serbia and Slovenia mark the best result of 19 milliseconds. Serbian users also have the best latency in roaming of 31 ms with the smallest difference compared with domestic networks (63,2% higher latency). The biggest latency in domestic networks is in Croatia at 26 ms. The largest difference in roaming latency, compared with the domestic one, is n Greece. Their users have 23 ms at home, and 144 ms when roaming (526,1% bigger latency).