In the spirit of spring cleaning, we wanted to revisit this topic to see what has changed in the last 12 months.
While there has been no change in the number of countries with excellent market competition rankings (n=2), subtle changes 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 is the ongoing geopolitical environment and sanctions, which have led to:
The largest state-backed entities—Rostelecom, MTS, Megafon, and Beeline—absorbing smaller regional players to streamline "Sovereign Internet" compliance.
The second is that the measuring system we rely on for our ranking—APNIC Labs' AS Measurement—has experienced a significant drop in the number of samples it collects from Russia (15.5 million in 2021 to 171,000 in 2026) and in the number of observed networks (2,297 in 2021 to 425 in 2026). Both of these have led to higher ranking variance.
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.
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