What determines the cost of business broadband? The price depends on a variety of factors:
- Market competition
- Geographic type
- The cost to build and maintain networks
- Local regulations
- The type of access technology used.
TeleGeography’s Business Broadband Pricing platform dives into these dynamics, offering detailed insight into access types, prices and other characteristics that shape broadband services around the world.
Our pricing team refreshes and expands this data and analysis on a regular basis, and we recently undertook a major research update. Just this year, we collected data from 170+ countries, covering nearly 6,500 broadband plans that range from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps.
As someone who's spent countless hours collecting and reviewing this data, I wanted to highlight a few important trends that stood out from our analysis. Here are some of the biggest insights of where business broadband is going in 2026.
Fiber’s Increasing Dominance
Fiber broadband plans emerged as the dominant access type in 2025, comprising about 56% of all global offerings. This marks a 9% increase from 2022, solidifying fiber as the leading access technology across all regions. Wireless plans follow behind, varying from 16% to 36% regionally.
Our Business Broadband Pricing platform breaks this data down further by region and access type, revealing the distribution of various access technologies within a region, as well as their respective contributions to each access type. In Oceania, for example, 78% of all plans are fiber, thanks to government-backed infrastructure projects such as Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) and New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative.
Cable-based plans are most prevalent in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. & Canada, while satellite connectivity is most commonly used in Africa. Satellite broadband remains an important solution for customers in rural or hard-to-reach areas, where wireline services are limited. Interestingly, while cable connectivity accounts for only 7% of plans in Europe, the region still makes up 30% of all cable plans globally, with the U.S. & Canada leading at 40%.
Business Broadband as a Cost-Effective Alternative
When it comes to price, how does business broadband stack up against other key connectivity options? Utilizing insights from our Cloud and WAN Research Service, we found that business broadband consistently remains a more cost-effective choice compared to MPLS VPN and Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), even when accounting for premium rates.
On average, median 100 Mbps MPLS port prices in the surveyed cities were 7.3 times higher than corresponding broadband prices. This disparity ranged from 2.8 times greater in Rome to 20.2 times greater in Sofia. Simultaneously, median 100 Mbps DIA port prices were, on average, 3.5 times higher than broadband, with the difference ranging from 1.6 times in Rome to 8.9 times in Sofia.
Although it may not always replace the alternative options due to differing service level assurances, broadband can often affordably enhance an enterprise's network options.
Cost Perception vs. True Affordability
This year, we took a closer look at the perceived cost of broadband compared to its true affordability across several Asian countries. Our findings were shaped by various components, including the strength of a country’s currency, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), and access type used.
Understanding PPP is particularly important when analyzing overall connectivity costs, since prices expressed in U.S. dollars alone can misrepresent affordability in different countries. Take Vietnam, for instance: an 101-500 Mbps plan might appear to cost only $32 U.S. dollars, but when adjusted for PPP, the price is significantly higher to account for cost of living and local income.
The figure below demonstrates this contrast. The red bars show the median U.S. dollar price for 101-500 Mbps plans, while the blue bars show the PPP-adjusted U.S. dollar price. In countries where blue bars surpass red bars, broadband is more expensive locally than can be assumed from U.S. dollar prices. Despite the pattern observed in these Asian countries, affordability levels still vary widely from country to country.
Purchasing Power Parity versus Median USD Price for 101-500 Mbps Plans in Asia
Lower Prices, Higher Speeds
The continued rollout of fiber, advancements in cable access and price competition are reshaping how broadband speed and cost interact. Greater discounts on a per Mbps basis are made by offering higher bandwidth plans at the same or slightly higher prices, encouraging customers to upgrade to faster connections.
These shifts are visible in the changing distribution of speed tiers. At lower levels such as 0-10 Mbps and 11-50 Mbps, the global share of plans fell from 26% to 18% and 31% to 27%, respectively, between 2022 and 2025. Meanwhile, higher tiers experienced growth: 101-500 Mbps plans and 1000+ Mbps plans increased by 5%, while 501-999 Mbps plans increased by 2%, over the same period. Particularly those in competitive markets have begun phasing out low-capacity offerings and replacing them with higher capacity plans, using price narrowing to encourage consumers to shift to higher capacities.
Price narrowing is particularly evident in Europe, where markets are highly competitive and infrastructure is well-developed. In this region, the price per Mbps is the lowest. In contrast, regions with weaker local competition like in the Middle East and the Caribbean & Atlantic face higher prices both per Mbps and per month.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., low dollar-per-Mbps prices might appear competitive, but its higher median monthly cost tells a different story. Businesses are paying a higher premium for fiber internet compared to other similarly developed markets. In reality, fast connections don’t always come cheap.
Looking Ahead
As broadband connectivity continues to evolve, we will be watching how affordability, emerging technologies, and local markets shape the future of broadband.
You can access all of TeleGeography's business broadband intelligence in our Business Broadband Pricing platform. Here's a quick look at how it works.
For more pricing data and analysis, take a look our Network Pricing Database. You can select the modules you need or subscribe to all:
- Dedicated Internet Access
- Ethernet Over MPLS
- Ethernet VPN
- IP Transit
- Local Access
- MPLS VPN
- Network-as-a-Service (NaaS)
- SD-WAN
- Wavelengths
