Five fibre operators sell the same upgrade, from 1 Gbps to 5 Gbps, but put strikingly different prices on it. Eir in Ireland asks just four per cent more, and Orange in Spain five. AT&T charges thirty per cent more; TotalPlay in Mexico more than doubles the price. Claro in Brazil charges nearly three times as much.

Five times the speed. A premium ranging from four to 178 per cent.

The contrast is not confined to these five operators. Tarifica’s Telecom Pricing Intelligence Platform tracks 65 operators in 28 markets selling both gigabit and faster fibre, including services reaching 10 Gbps. Across the industry, the price of moving beyond gigabit is anything but settled.

Same Speed Upgrade, Very Different Prices

We compared gigabit and multi-gigabit offers with matching recorded package features, so that differences in television, landline, router, contract, mobile allowance or subscriptions would not distort the result. That produced 320 matched comparisons across 51 operators in 23 markets.

Fifty of the 51 operators charge more for the faster tier, and none charges less. The median premium among all 51 is 23 per cent, but the variation is far more revealing.

Fourteen operators charge less than ten per cent extra, while twelve charge at least sixty per cent more. Across the sample, premiums reach more than 300 per cent.

We compared gigabit and multi-gigabit offers with matching recorded package features, so that differences in television, landline, router, contract, mobile allowance or subscriptions would not distort the result. That produced 320 matched comparisons across 51 operators in 23 markets.

Fifty of the 51 operators charge more for the faster tier, and none charges less. The median premium among all 51 is 23 per cent, but the variation is far more revealing.

Fourteen operators charge less than ten per cent extra, while twelve charge at least sixty per cent more. Across the sample, premiums reach more than 300 per cent.

Speed alone, however, doesn’t explain the premium. While it would be reasonable to expect the biggest price increases to accompany the biggest jumps in speed, they don’t consistently do so. Across the 51 operators, the relationship between the speed increase and the premium is weak. The five operators offering the identical fivefold upgrade make that particularly clear.

The contrast extends beyond that group. Movistar in Spain charges just EUR 5 more to move from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps, EUR 65 to EUR 70. Swisscom and docomo also price a tenfold increase at around nine per cent more. Virgin Media in the UK, by contrast, charges a median premium of 54 per cent for less than twice the speed. Awasr in Oman charges more than four times as much for a roughly sixfold increase. Britain provides another expensive example. Sky’s premium ranges from 121 to 186 per cent depending on the package; on one television bundle, the price rises from GBP 43 to GBP 95. That is for a fivefold speed increase, the same step Eir prices at just four per cent.

Digi Spain: When Network Matters More Than Speed

Digi in Spain offers a different kind of contrast: a faster fibre service that can cost less than a slower one. The explanation is not a discount on speed, but the network carrying it.

Digi’s regular Fibra range relies largely on wholesale access to Telefónica’s network: 300 Mbps costs EUR 25 a month and 1 Gbps EUR 30. Fibra SMART, delivered over Digi’s own fibre, starts at EUR 10 for 500 Mbps and reaches EUR 20 for 2 Gbps and EUR 25 for 10 Gbps. In August 2026, Digi doubled the speed of its EUR 20 SMART plan from 1 Gbps to 2 Gbps without raising the price.

That leaves a striking contrast. A customer on Digi’s wholesale-based service pays EUR 30 for 1 Gbps, while one reached by SMART pays EUR 20 for 2 Gbps. Within SMART, higher speeds cost progressively more. The inversion appears only when the two networks are compared.

Digi pays wholesale-access charges when it uses Telefónica’s infrastructure, but faces different costs on its own network. SMART is available only where Digi has built out that network, which reached a reported 14.8 million homes by mid-2026, against a target of 21 million by 2030. The cheaper, faster offer is therefore not a choice open to every Digi customer: availability depends on the address. For that reason, Digi is discussed separately rather than included in the like-for-like sample.

Figure 2 captures the point: across Digi’s own SMART network, moving from 500 Mbps to 10 Gbps adds just EUR 15 a month. Yet a customer on its wholesale-based gigabit product pays EUR 10 more than someone receiving twice the speed on SMART. Here, the network behind the offer matters more than the speed on the label.

What Faster Fibre Really Costs

The differences are not simply national. In Spain, two operators charge premiums of around six and eight per cent; six Irish operators range from four to forty per cent. Britain’s two operators in the sample are at 54 and 153 per cent. Even within broadly comparable markets, operators take very different approaches.

For some, multi-gigabit fibre is the next step in a familiar speed ladder. For others, it is a premium product with a premium price. Those choices help explain the spread, but they are not the whole story.

Digi shows why. Wholesale dependence, network ownership and coverage affect the economics behind a tariff, even when those factors are not visible in the advertised price. The gap between operators reflects both commercial positioning and the networks on which they depend.

For customers, the result is simple: the price of faster fibre depends far more on which operator — and sometimes which network — serves their address than on the headline speed alone.

About the Analysis

The analysis uses standard consumer fibre plans tracked in Tarifica’s Telecom Pricing Intelligence Platform (TPIP) in Q3 2026. Gigabit plans are those with an advertised download speed between 800 and 1,500 Mbps; multi-gigabit plans are those at 2,000 Mbps or above. Only fibre connections are included, and prices are the advertised standard monthly price rather than a promotional rate. TPIP tracks the United States as four metropolitan panels rather than a single national market; these are treated here as one market, and each US operator in the sample appears in a single panel, except one whose plans are priced identically in two.

Sixty-five operators across twenty-eight markets sell both tiers. Comparisons are matched within each operator on six recorded retail attributes — television, landline, router, contract length, bundled mobile allowance and included subscriptions — which controls for those attributes rather than making the plans identical in every respect. Plans are matched first and the cheapest qualifying plan at each speed tier is then selected from within the matched group. An “unlimited” bundled mobile allowance is treated as distinct from having no bundled mobile. Where an operator yields more than one matched package comparison, the figure used is the median across them; several operators’ premiums vary by package. Figure 1 is a narrower cut of the same data: it shows each operator’s premium for its one-to-five-gigabit comparisons specifically, rather than the median across all of its matched comparisons at any speed step.

Four operators were excluded where the available evidence shows a material product difference beyond speed. In Italy, Iliad, WindTre and TIM each pair a plan designated for state-subsidised “white areas” against a standard product, so the apparent zero premium reflects where the service is delivered rather than a choice available to a customer; Italy therefore does not appear in the matched sample. Ooredoo in Qatar pairs plans carrying different entertainment packages. Digi in Spain is treated as a separate case study because its two ranges run on different network arrangements.

That leaves fifty-one operators in twenty-three markets and 320 matched comparisons. A wider robustness check, relaxing the matching to exclude included subscriptions, gives fifty-four operators in twenty-four markets with a median premium of twenty-six per cent and a Spearman correlation of 0.21 — close to the matched figures. The samples are reported separately and are not combined. Premiums are calculated within each operator in local currency, so exchange rates do not affect them. Across the strict sample, the speed-multiplier/price-premium correlation is Spearman 0.19 and Pearson 0.08.