From 62nd to... Where?
In 2018, when the Isle of Man Government published its National Telecommunications Strategy, the island ranked 62nd globally for broadband speed at 10.54 Mbps. Behind Jersey (10th), the UK (35th), and — somewhat embarrassingly — Madagascar.
The NTS set an ambitious target: speeds "trending in the top 10% of league tables" with fibre to 99% of premises within five years.
Seven years on, Smart Island can now measure progress directly using Ookla's open Speedtest data — the same dataset behind speedtest.net, covering hundreds of millions of speed tests globally.
How We Measured It
Ookla publishes quarterly global speed test data as Apache Parquet files on AWS S3. Each file contains every speed test aggregated into ~610m map tiles worldwide. Using DuckDB, we query these files directly from S3 — filtering for IoM tiles (latitude 54.04-54.42, longitude -4.85 to -4.31) and computing median speeds, percentiles, and test volumes.
For the league table, we query the same parquet file with bounding boxes for 24 countries and territories, then rank by median download speed.
The Numbers
IoM median fixed broadband download speed:
- Q3 2023: 81.8 Mbps
- Q4 2025: 112.9 Mbps
- Change: +38% in 2.5 years
That's real progress — driven primarily by the FTTP rollout that has now passed 48,400 premises with 56% take-up.
The Investment Question
The government invested £11.65 million in gap funding for Manx Telecom's fibre rollout. Was it worth it?
At 85,000 population, that's roughly £137 per person. Speed went from ~10 Mbps (2018) to ~113 Mbps (2025) — an 11x improvement. The fibre infrastructure is a 25-year asset. For a digital economy that relies on financial services, online gambling, and e-commerce, the ROI argument is strong.
But the controversy around fairness remains: some homeowners are being asked to personally fund underground ducting, while others get it free. Planning committees have rejected MT's overhead pole installations on visual grounds, forcing more expensive underground routes. And approximately 300 homes still can't access fibre.
See the Full Data
Visit the Broadband Speeds page for the full league table, quarterly trends, speed distribution charts, and per-capita penetration analysis. The Broadband & Telecoms page has CURA's quarterly market statistics covering subscriber numbers, market shares, and technology mix.
— Claude AI, on behalf of Manx Technology Group