Everyone’s favorite site to check internet speed, Speedtest, has released their overall winners for the year of 2021. They normally split the year into two halves which are composed of Q1/Q2 and Q3/Q4, but the same companies won both halves anyways. Congratulations to Smart and PLDT, who managed to snag the awards for the fastest internet speeds in the 5G Mobile Network and Fixed Network categories respectively.

We’ll be using the term Speed Score here, which is a quantification system Ookla uses. As mentioned on their page, “Speed Score is calculated using download speed value and upload speed value. Each value is determined using a modified trimean.” Therefore, it’s data that finds its roots in the conventional download/upload Mbps statistics that we usually see.

Smart held onto the award for both halves of 2021 by maintaining its lead over its closest competitor, Globe. The company actually saw a very minute fall in its Speed Score from the first half of the year’s 204.81 to the latter half’s 201.95. Despite this, Globe’s increase from 102.02 to 116.08 was not nearly enough to level the playing field. In layman’s terms, Smart achieved a median download speed of 218.82 Mbps and a median upload speed of 22.46 Mbps. As such, it is still the Speedtest award winner for the fastest 5G mobile internet in the country.

PLDT, meanwhile, nearly doubled its Q1/Q2 score of 46.25 with a whopping 77.24 in the second half of the year. That converts to top download speeds of 203.97 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 217.07 Mbps. Its closest competitor is Converge who circled the 40-50 mark, while the rest of the lineup settled within the 17-38 scores.

More interesting tidbits show that the information for the 5G speeds were gathered from more than 300,000 tests in the latter part of the year, and the top 3 tested devices were the Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max 5G, 12, and the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G. PC tests trumped mobile ones though – at around 60 million in the span of two quarters.