A recent study by Tarifica of six major European markets – France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom – found that prices in five of the six countries fell between 2023 and 2025. The exception to this was the United Kingdom where prices rose during this period.

Key Findings

In 2023, the United Kingdom was already the third most expensive market, but with its average price increasing and the declines in price from Germany and the Netherlands, the country ranked as the most expensive for consumer broadband service by Q1 2025. This increase was driven exclusively by the rise in cost for 1000+Mbps plans (the fastest grade of service tracked), where the country’s average price increased by more than 50%. For its other offer types, the country did see modest price declines, just not enough to offset the price increase for these super users.

Spain, the Netherlands, and France all saw double digit drops in their average price. For all three countries, these price reductions were seen across every user type and are likely indicative of market-wide changes.

Germany and Italy, on the other hand, were largely static, with pricing dropping by only 2.71% and 1.71%, respectively. Interestingly, these markets are on opposite sides of the European pricing spectrum, with Italy rating as one of the least expensive and Germany as one of the most.

Italy was the lowest cost market both 2023 and 2025. It appears likely that fixed broadband has effectively reached commodity status in the country. Across the consumer types studied, there was very little price difference between the six providers reviewed in the market.

Germany was near the top of the price spectrum, rating as the 4th of the six countries in both 2023 and 2025. Similarly, the country showed fewer signs of commoditization, with significant price spreads between the six providers tracked for most consumer types.

Highest speed plans are still not universally available 

Beyond pricing, this study also assessed the availability of broadband plans by download speed, identifying the percentage of operators that had plans which qualified for each of the profiles employed.

In both 2023 and 2025, across all countries, every operator offered a consumer plan with an advertised download speed of at least 100Mbps. As the associated speeds increased, however, there were some operators which did not qualify for these profiles.

In examining this availability data, two trends stood out:

First, there is a substantial divide between 1000Mbps and 2000Mbps plans. 1000Mbps appears to be increasingly standard in advanced markets. Across five of the six countries, more than 80% of operators currently offer plans that meet or exceed this speed. The lone exception to this was the United Kingdom, where only 38% of the operators covered met this threshold.

Second, for operators which did not meet profile requirements, there was very little progress between 2023 and 2025.  Despite all of the investment in fiber and other high-speed broadband networks, the overall availability of plan types across operators has only changed modestly over the period studied. Of the 34 operators reviewed, only three saw any plan download speed changes that qualified for inclusion into the study profiles: Congstar in Germany began offering plans with at least 250+Mbps, EE in the UK expanded to achieve the 1000+Mbps profile, and KPN in the Netherlands met the 2000+Mbps profile.

Even with these improvements, significant gaps remain in the availability of plans that meet the various speed profiles in 2025. The majority of these were for the highest speed plans (particularly the 2000+Mbps requirement) but there were market gaps at lower speed thresholds too. For instance, there is a major fixed broadband operator in the United Kingdom that still does not meet the 250+Mbps requirement and there are providers in Germany, Italy, and France who fail to meet the 500+Mbps requirement.

This finding likely reflects the reality of the expense and long deployment times associated with building and expanding fiber optic networks.