The Fastest UK Cities and Regions for 5G Mobile Data Speeds
Mobile benchmarking firm Opensignal has published the results of their latest study, which reveals that the fastest UK city for 5G (mobile broadband) internet download speeds is Birmingham (162.7Mbps), while the West Midlands in England tops the table for fastest UK regions on 151.4Mbps.
The report is based off crowdsourced data gathered from users on hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.) between 1st November 2022 and 29th January 2023. The results were then processed to reveal how the primary mobile network operators compared across various categories.
The study also examined the uplift in mobile broadband speeds, by location, when going from a 4G to 5G network. Overall, users’ 5G download speeds were found to be 3.7 – 5.5 times faster than those seen on 4G, with people in Reading seeing the greatest uplift (5.5 times) and those in London observing the least (3.7 times).
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Interestingly, the study also found that there was little difference in the uplift in average download speeds seen by users in rural and urban areas with 5G — with increases of 4.7 times and 4.5 times, respectively — compared to 4G. But urban users still see download speeds on both 5G and 4G that are “significantly faster” than their rural counterparts – by 20.1 Mbps (17.6%) and 5.8 Mbps (23.7%), respectively.
Naturally, urban 5G users spend far more of their time with an active 5G connection (9.6%) than rural users (6.6%), which is hardly surprising given the limited amount of rural 5G network coverage.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Having Three’s HQ in Reading has probably contributed to the improvements.
Three Mobile is absolutely dreadful in London.
I think its 4G capacity is beyond full in London. But 5G is better.
I can vouch for 5G speeds in the west Midlands, at times have hit 800Mbs to 1Gbps download with about 80Mbs upload, as live about 10m away from the mast, otherwise average 400 to 700Mbs download.
In and all around my city I get nothing less than 600Mbps and 50Mbps upload, makes Reading with their 150Mbps look like dial up, I am with Three and it’s been superb, if latency wasn’t so important for online gaming I’d switch to their 5G broadband for everything
I don’t use Three for my main broadband but the backup I have easily gets 15ms consistent ping, though I do have an antenna directly wired into my router