EE Delivers the Fastest Mobile Broadband Speeds in London for H2 2014

RootMetrics has released its latest study of Mobile Broadband (3G and 4G) performance across the city of London (England) for the 2nd half of 2014, which found that EE remains the faster mobile network operator with median download speeds of 23.15Mbps (up from 17.8Mbps in H1 2014 and 13.6Mbps in 2013). Meanwhile Three UK is the slowest.

As usual there are some caveats to the RootMetrics data, such as the fact that they don’t separate the performance of 3G and 4G networks in order to give a more balanced perspective. Likewise EE has the more mature 4G platform and, much like Vodafone, is also testing the latest LTE-Advanced with Carrier Aggregation technology in the city.

By comparison Three UK’s deployment of 4G is much further behind the others and they’re also the only major operator to offer “all-you-can-eat” (unlimited) data usage on several tariffs, although Tethering is now capped (i.e. less coverage and more congestion = worse performance).

It’s worth comparing these results with the same study, which has been conducted in London twice since 2013. Take note that the 2013 sample was also before most of the new 4G networks came online from Three UK, O2 and Vodafone.

Average Mobile Speeds in London (H1 2014)
1. EE (Download: 17.8Mbps Upload: 9.3Mbps)
2. Vodafone (Download: 10.1Mbps Upload: 3.8Mbps)
3. O2 (Download: 9.6Mbps Upload: 3.2Mbps)
4. Three UK (Download: 6.5Mbps Upload: 2Mbps)

Average Mobile Speeds in London (2013)
1. EE (Download: 13.6Mbps Upload:8.4Mbps)
2. Three UK (Download: 5.5Mbps Upload: 1.8Mbps)
3. Vodafone (Download: 4.8Mbps Upload: 1.4Mbps)
4. O2 (Download: 3.2Mbps Upload: 1.2Mbps)

So far the 4G upgrade appears to have roughly doubled the median performance of most operators.