Ookla Name Vodafone UK Best for 5G Mobile Video Streaming in H1 2025
Network benchmarking firm Ookla, which collects data from consumers via their popular broadband Speedtest.net website and App, have published the results of their Q1-Q2 2025 study into the video streaming performance of 5G mobile networks and awarded Vodafone the best on a score of 85.29 out of 100. But none of the operators performed particularly poorly.
Ookla used data collected from around 211,000 samples (users) and 6.3 million tests to produce its video streaming score, which captured a range of key performance indicators during the playback of a high-resolution video clip. The score reflects a balanced outcome that weighted aspects such as the time it took for a video to start, the level of uninterrupted playback and HD (High Definition) resolution performance.
Overall, most of the primary mobile network operators delivered similar results across each scoring category, except for “Acceptable Video Start Time“, where O2 (Virgin Media) seemed to fall a bit further behind the pack. Vodafone came top of the pack with a total score of 85.29, which was closely followed by Three UK on 84.33, EE (BT) on 82.64 and O2 on 81.67.
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In short, there’s not much to tell the operators apart, and all of them should be able to deliver a reasonable experience. This isn’t too surprising as mobile devices rarely need to stream in anything above HD quality, which usually only requires download speeds of between 2 to 5Mbps.
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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Does anyone find it just a little odd that EE used to top all these polls, now Vodafone and Three or VodafoneThree now top almost everything?
Looks like this was specifically and only for 5G networks.
Both Vodafone and Three (independently) have been heavily installing 5G and Vodafone (at least in the South) have been enabling 5G Ultra/SA.
My experience with EE has been a declining 4G network with slower and slower speeds and a 5G network that offers no benefits in most locations since they don’t seem to have been doing much work on the backhaul (5G Icon but no speed or capacity increases). They’ve recently been picking back up but at least for now they’re definitely slightly behind on 5G.
Depends on where you live I guess, where I live even EE4G delivers over 50mbps in many areas and their 5G has the most coverage, Three does have 5G coverage and if you’re close to N78 then they are the best without doubt, the only problem it that it doesn’t go very far.
In many counties’ like mine, O2 and Vodafone have NO 5G coverage, so that is why the results does match my personal experience.
I have to agree with Pepstar, Ookla seems favourable to VF and three. I think a real metric will be when the new root metrics or open signal benchmarks come out, if EE’s ranking decreases then we know VF means business
For sure, sure geographically dependent.
At least in my area, EE 4G used to provide LTE-A at >100mbps in most towns/cities. Now many of those sites don’t get over 30-40mbps. And EEs 5G NSA doesn’t seem much quicker than LTE-A used to be. I’m not sure what the cause is but it certainly has declined in real terms.
Vodafone on the other hand, used to be barely acceptable on 4G but these days they’ve covered whole towns with 5G SA.
Adnaan, FYI Ookla owns RootMetrics
Haha, Vodafone are joke. In Cambridgeshire and Cambridge it’s a few bars of 4G at best. 5G is a pipedream, where do they get these fantastic metrics from??
definitely, it’s like places where you can’t even send an iMessage here, awful.