Internet Market Competition in 2026

It’s often said that healthy competition can increase consumer choice, which, in turn, can reduce prices and foster innovation, efficiency, and quality as competing businesses seek to differentiate their products.

Last May, I wrote two posts discussing how Pulse collates data on market competition for 237 countries, and some examples of where we have seen the most significant changes in market competition between 2023 and 2025.

In the spirit of Spring cleaning, I thought I’d revisit this topic to see what changes we’ve tracked over the past 12 months.

How Fluid is Market Competition

As a reminder, Pulse uses the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) (via IIJ's Internet Health Report) to indicate market competition. A low HHI score—countries with many Internet Service Providers (ISPs)— indicates a healthy level of market competition.

Table 1 — Pulse Market competition rating as per Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) score.

HHI score (per IIJ)	Pulse Market competition rating
Less than 500	Excellent
501—1000	Very Good
1001—1500	Good
1501—2000	Fair
2001—3500	Poor
More than 3500	Very Poor

Countries with a large number of ISPs usually receive a low HHI rating per this indicator. As of April 2026, two countries have an ‘Excellent’ market competition rating: Brazil (HHI=352) and Bangladesh (HHI=367) (see interactive).

While there has been little change at the top in the past year, subtle changes across the board have led to a slight increase (n=7) in the number of countries with Fair to Very Good ratings. Overall, 28 countries jumped to a higher market competition rating between May 2025 and 2026, while nine countries slipped from a higher to a lower competition rating, including Russia, which had the lowest HHI score (most competitive market) 12 months earlier.

What’s happening in Russia?

There are two factors to consider when trying to understand why market diversity has decreased in Russia over the past 12 months.

The first factor is the ongoing geopolitical environment and sanctions, which have led to:

• The number one-ranked ISP for market share 12 months ago (AS210644 Aeza Group LLC) being sanctioned for enabling global cybercriminal activity, and as such migrating much of its infrastructure to a new network and reducing its connectivity with Western transit providers.
• New government requirements, including higher license fees, larger minimum operational capital, and mandatory deployment of the FSB's SORM traffic interception equipment, forcing smaller ISPs out of the market.
• The largest state-backed entities—Rostelecom, MTS, Megafon, and Beeline—absorbing smaller regional players to streamline "Sovereign Internet" compliance.

The second factor is that the measuring system that we rely on for our ranking—APNIC Labs’ AS Measurement—has experienced a significant drop in the number of samples it is collecting from Russia (15.5 million in 2021 to 171,000 in 2026) and observed networks (2,297 in 2021 to 425 in 2026). Both of these have led to higher ranking variance, as seen in the table below.

The Starlink Effect Continues

It’s well known that the largest market disruptor in the last three years in many countries has been Starlink. As we noted in last year’s post, we expected to see Starlink’s presence in more countries’ top five ISPs and, with it, an increase in diversity ratings. This has certainly been the case with Starlink ranking among the top five ISPs in 90 different countries at some time between 2025 and 2026 (Table 1).

Table 2 — Number of countries where Starlink ranks in its top five ISPs

Rank	1	2	3	4	5	Total
April 2023	0	1	0	2	3	6
April 2024	1	0	5	3	6	15
April 2025	3	7	15	15	13	53
April 2026	9	18	29	14	20	90

Most of this growth has happened in Africa and Island States in the Americas and Oceania (Table 3).

Table 3 — Countries where Starlink has been ranked among the top five ISPs since April 2023.

Africa	Americas	Asia	Oceania	Europe
Burkina Faso Burundi Benin Botswana Central African Republic Chad Côte d'Ivoire Cameroon Cabo Verde Djibouti Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Gambia Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya Comoros Liberia Lesotho Madagascar Mali Mauritania Malawi Mozambique Niger Nigeria Rwanda* Sierra Leone Senegal Sudan South Sudan Sao Tome and Principe Eswatini Mayotte Zambia Zimbabwe	Antigua and Barbuda* Argentina Barbados Saint Barthélemy Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba Bahamas Curaçao Dominica Dominican Republic Grenada French Guiana Guyana Haiti Jamaica Saint Lucia Saint Martin Martinique* Panama Puerto Rico* Sint Maarten Suriname Turks and Caicos Islands Uruguay Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Virgin Islands (British) Virgin Islands (U.S.)	Brunei Darussalam Iraq Sri Lanka Myanmar Maldives Qatar Syrian Arab Republic Timor-Leste Yemen	American Samoa Cook Islands Fiji Federated States of Micronesia Guam Kiribati Marshall Islands Northern Mariana Islands Nauru Niue Pitcairn Solomon Islands Tokelau Tonga Tuvalu Vanuatu Samoa	Andorra* Åland Islands Bulgaria* Germany* Falkland Islands Georgia* Guernsey Greece Montserrat Malta*

* Starlink was not among the top five ISPs in the country as of 1 April 2026.

In my next post, I’ll dig into where we are seeing Starlink have the greatest impact on market competition and how this is impacting the Internet resilience of the affected countries.