Ofcom Study Reveals Cat 6 4G Mobile Broadband Speeds in London UK

The national telecoms regulator has today produced an updated study of 4G based Mobile Broadband speeds in central London, which specifically looks at the performance impact of the latest Category 4 vs 6 (LTE-Advanced) networks. Once again EE wins the speed crown, but Vodafone are catching up.

The new report should be taken as a separate addition to the original Smartphone Cities study from March 2016 (full results summary), which looked at a number of other cities in the United Kingdom and only made use of the much older Category 4 based Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.

By comparison the latest update only examined central London, but it also harnessed the much more recent Category 6 LTE-Advanced capable Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ (model SM-G928F). This is the latest 4G standard and can cope with data speeds of up to 200-300Mbps (Megabits per second), which is something that only EE and Vodafone are deploying in big urban areas (the others have yet to clarify their plans).

The biggest performance leap is largely achieved through the use of Carrier Aggregation, which allows an operator to harness multiple spectrum bands (e.g. 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2.6GHz) at the same time.

Apparently this phase of additional testing was carried over a five day period in March 2016. The initial 4km radius used in the main testing was also replaced with a smaller 2km radius in central London (still within the original area). In addition, the centre for this was moved from Charing Cross station to Ofcom’s head office in Riverside House for logistical reasons.

Broadly speaking it’s no surprise to find that the two most mature operators (at least in terms of 4G LTE-Advanced coverage) – EE and Vodafone – both come out on top for both download and upload speeds; although EE are clearly the most dominant and also delivered almost symmetrical performance.

An EE Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The great speeds that our customers are getting is down to the investment that we’ve made in adding more capacity to our network. These Cat 6 devices, which include big-selling smartphones like the iPhone 6s and the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7, on the EE network are giving customers an amazing internet experience – fast data, great response times, and incredible reliability. And we’ll keep investing in more capacity across the UK to make sure customers on the EE network are always getting the fastest mobile speeds.”

By comparison Three UK and O2 are left to languish further behind, although that’s hardly surprising given Three UK’s distinct lack of spectrum and O2’s debt-ridden parent that could be holding back vital capacity investment. Right now only EE really has the spectrum / capacity to deliver a Cat 6 boost, but the reality of shared capacity between users is that you don’t get much over Cat 4.

On the upside all of the mobile network operators showed a similar and quite noticeable improvement in latency, which is good for online video game fans, VoIP, VPN and smoother browsing. Never the less this was only a very small snapshot of performance in one particular area and the methodology was different from Ofcom’s previous update, which highlights some of the challenges when testing rapidly evolving mobile platforms.