“… worse than Romania”: What this tired telecoms comparison gets wrong

Romania’s strong connectivity is the product of decades of community-built networks, early fibre adoption and a very different regulatory environment. Yet “worse than Romania” is a comparison that the British press keeps returning to when discussing the UK’s own telecom shortcomings. Adam Hughes asks: what can we learn from Romania’s experience, and what does the comparison reveal about our assumptions?

“The UK has worse mobile coverage than Romania”, the Financial Times declared recently.

Imagine – worse than Romania?

The state of UK telecoms is certainly poor; according to Kearney's Global Telecom Health Index has ranked it 33 out of 34 surveyed countries for overall sector health based on financial performance, commercial strength, network quality, market structure, and customer satisfaction.

The FT article argues that this is partly because falling prices have “had a real and lasting impact on operators’ ability to invest in rolling out networks”: the cost of mobile services for a typical user fell by 20% in real terms between 2020 and 2025, despite average data use more than doubling.

A similar article in The Daily Mail also picked out Romania – as well as Kazakhstan, Cambodia and war-torn Kharkiv, for good measure – for having better mobile signal than the UK.

Unfavourably comparing the UK’s mobile coverage with Romania’s isn’t new, as this 2016 article from The Guardian shows. The same year, MP Ian Blackford said in the House of Commons:

“Now we know, courtesy of the government’s own infrastructure watchdog, that mobile coverage is worse than Romania.”

I find the comparison a bit irksome – why does Romania keep coming up as a benchmark? No one would bat an eyelid if the headline was “The UK trails South Korea in mobile coverage”.

Romania seems to occupy a place in the British imagination as shorthand for somewhere the UK expects to outperform, based on outdated views about both countries.

Self-reflection is good, but this is self-reflection wrapped in condescension.

The data itself is not the problem; the revealing part is the assumption that Romania’s superior performance should be surprising.

Here’s the thing – Romania’s strong fixed and mobile connectivity is no accident. It is the product of several advantages accumulated over decades, yet it is usually mentioned in the British press only as the surprising half of an unfavourable comparison.

Following the collapse of Eastern Europe’s centrally planned economies, Romania experienced a broadband boom in the early 2000s. Unlike in many Western European markets, where a handful of telcos dominated internet access, Romania developed a fiercely competitive market, leading to hundreds of ISPs offering affordable high-speed connections even in smaller towns.

Because Romania lacked the extensive legacy telephone networks found in much of Western Europe, local entrepreneurs and residents often found it easier to build new infrastructure than to upgrade copper lines. Thousands of informal rețele de cartier, or “block networks”, were formed by groups of users willing to rent a leased line and share the costs.

Initially, these weren’t really ISPs at all; they were residents of apartment blocks running Ethernet or coaxial cables between neighbouring flats and buildings, while fibre formed the backbone between neighbourhoods. These were particularly common in Romania’s dense apartment developments; in Bucharest, these estates make up 80% of housing stock, and a single fibre connection could serve hundreds of flats in one block, making deployment dramatically cheaper.

The phenomenon was, in effect, one big, decentralised LAN party. People joined initially to share games, music, films and local FTP servers, with internet access often arriving later. By 2008, there were over 1,800 networks nationwide, serving around 300,000 customers. Many of these micro-ISPs were eventually consolidated into larger providers, while companies such as RCS & RDS – now Digi – expanded through a mixture of organic growth and acquisitions.

The consolidation of these networks helped create an exceptionally dense metropolitan fibre footprint. Operators then expanded and upgraded that infrastructure through FTTB and FTTH rollouts – by the end of 2023, three-quarters of Romania’s fixed internet connections were fibre-only. This extensive fibre footprint also helped make high-capacity backhaul more readily available as mobile networks expanded.

But backhaul is only part of the story. Romania also imposed mobile-specific coverage obligations through its spectrum licences, requiring each operator to cover at least 98% of the population using its own radio access network. ANCOM’s field measurements in 2024 found that all four operators exceeded that threshold, with voice coverage ranging from 98.1% to 98.6%. Together, these factors gave Romania broad mobile coverage alongside the extensive fibre backhaul needed to support high-capacity data services.

UK operators, meanwhile, face lengthy planning processes, restrictions on mast heights and difficulties upgrading or replacing existing sites, as well as substantial spectrum costs and the expense of removing Huawei equipment from their networks.

Romania’s dense communist-era housing made deployment unusually economical in its cities. But it is not simply an easier country to cover: it has a lower population density and a considerably larger rural population share than the UK. The more convincing comparison therefore lies in market structure, regulation, spectrum policy and deployment economics rather than geography alone.

The FT is right to note that low retail prices can reduce operators’ ability to invest, but pricing is only one variable. Romania shows that affordability need not produce poor network performance when operators also compete on quality and benefit from favourable deployment economics.

National wealth is no guarantee of infrastructure quality; sometimes, legacy networks become an obstacle to upgrading. For example, October 2025 figures from Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index showed that Bulgaria, Vietnam and North Macedonia all outperformed richer countries such as the UK, Germany and Japan on median mobile download speed, despite much smaller economies. Romania also ranked ahead of the UK, although it does not outperform it on every measure and its 5G rollout still lags behind much of the EU.

The point is not that the UK can reproduce Romania’s history, but that network outcomes reflect the whole investment environment: planning rules, spectrum policy, infrastructure competition, backhaul availability and the cost of legacy systems.

Romania’s success should not be surprising or considered accidental. It built a telecommunications market that rewarded entrepreneurship, competition and sustained infrastructure investment.

The UK has lessons to learn, and Romania should be treated as a case study rather than a punchline.