EE Named Best UK Mobile Operator in New 2026 Network Test Study
Mobile operator EE (BT) has once again come top in the annual 2026 umlaut connect UK Mobile Network Test, which deployed a range of different benchmarks to test 4G and 5G performance (voice and broadband) across 16 cities, 24 smaller towns and along 10,170km of major roads. On the flip side, O2 (Virgin Media) continued to be ranked at the bottom.
The study’s more scientific focused drivetests and walktests were both conducted between 27th October to 8th November 2025 using Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Smartphones for each operator. Additionally, some of the walk test teams visited several cities and travelled on trains between them. The test area accounts for 16.7 million people, or approximately 24.9% of the total population of the United Kingdom.
On top of that, the analysts also harnessed crowdsourced data, which was collected over 24 weeks from the end of May to early November 2025. A total of 5,702 million data samples were collected by this method from mobile phone users across the UK, which stems from tests conducted via various Smartphone apps with a special background diagnosis process.
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Overall, EE came top in all three of the primary data, voice and crowdsourced testing categories, scoring a total of 920 points (up from 913 last year) out of a possible 1,000. Following them were Vodafone on 808 (down from 815), Three UK on 799 (up from 765) and finally, at the bottom, was O2 on 768 (up from 729) – though they did once again improve their score. Otherwise, this marks the eleventh time in a row that EE has topped the study.
Maziar Kianzad, Global Network Benchmarking Lead at umlaut, said:
“Congratulations to British Telecom for its brand EE winning our Mobile Network Test in the UK for the eleventh time in a row. The operator achieves the highest scores in all test disciplines and scores ahead of the other operators – at a gap of more than 100 points. Vodafone achieves a good second place. Three manages to clearly improve compared to its result from the previous year. The biggest score improvement, achieved up to now in our current benchmarking season, is however obtained by VMO2 – nationwide, and also in London.”
The Full Report includes a lot more data, and we’ve pasted some of that below, although it’s wise to read the main report in order to get the correct context. For example, the first output below depicts the 5G based mobile broadband data rates that the study got when conducting a simple 7-second download test (note: the column headed “0 (Mbps)” should really be called “Average (Mbps)” – this looks like an error). The second image after that shows the crowdsourced results.
7 Second Download Test on 5G Connections
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Crowdsource Results
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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Poor o2 results doesn’t surprise me at all and I started looking at migration for all four of our sims to Spusu or 1p. What I care about most is EU roaming.
What you care about most is EU roaming, so you’re moving away from a network with one of the most generous EU roaming allowances?
yes, because I spend 10.5 months in the UK roughly and my O2 is getting worse and worse. When my full fibre internet go down I am literally without internet, despite having 4 out of 5 bars in 5G, not to mention patchy coverage along main roads causing an issue when listening online radio.
I don’t need 20 or 25GB of data in roaming, I’ve never used more than 6GB while being in continental Europe.
All of these studies should come with a fairly big asterisk that says “results valid until you enter a building”.
Will be interesting to see how it compares in a years time to see what effect the Vodafone/3 merger will have had.
I assume these tests excluded Norfolk and Suffolk?
I get an excellent signal on EE, 5G-NR all the time. Unfortunately its let down by constant cell tower hopping and latency that frequently hits 20 seconds.
I know the fault is due to a temporary cell tower that’s badly maintained, but they won’t do anything about it.
I’ve used every network over the last 24 months, and honestly I can see why EE costs so much as it’s the best network for coverage by a country mile! I still wouldn’t go with them direct mind so I’m with a MVNO that uses them!
Three had fantastic speeds on 5G, in fact I was getting speeds faster than my 900Mb full fibre connection at home! Sadly the 4G network was pretty dire in some places to the point I couldn’t use basic apps like banks, maps etc and the upload speed at home was abysmal at 1-2Mb otherwise I’d have got their home broadband service to be fair!
Vodafone was dropping down to Edge randomly even in built up areas where I apparently had good signal so found them pretty awful. On 4G I was getting speeds of around 4-5Mb, perfectly adequate for basic browsing, banking, maps etc.
O2 was shockingly bad and I wouldn’t wish them upon my worst enemy! There is literally a mast about 10 meters away from my house and I was getting speeds that made dial-up look fast! Most speed tests wouldn’t even complete, but when they did speeds of around 0.03Mb were common! I complained to O2 about this and their official advice was “to disable 4G and use 3G instead” – It turned out to be great advice as it actually boosted my download speed to 13Mb using HSDPA+ (3.5G)
I’m between Lebara offers and using 1p (EE network) as a stop gap.
I find the phone and data drop in several places. This didn’t happen with Lebara. So, EE is not a network I’d stay with
The company behind this testing appears to be German. As such, the character in the “0 (Mbps)” column isn’t a zero with a bar through it (which is usually used to denote the number zero from the letter O). Rather, it’s the other way around and is the letter O with a bar (although the font in the report looks suspiciously like zero…). This symbol is sometimes used in German speaking countries to mean average value. It comes from the fact “Average” in German is Durchschnitt, directly translated as cut-through.
Just thought I’d share what I learned on a random thought tangent.
You’re absolutely right
I don’t get how Hutchinson scored higher than O2. That network is so bad I don’t get how anybody can use it at all…
Has EE finally fixed VoLTE in roaming? Its absence wasn’t the only reason I left EE but it was driving me nuts!
Coverage is always subjective. In the North East EE doesn’t do so well, not having upgraded some sites for years. I use VF and have EE (1p) as backup data SIM.I travel lits of the country and in last few months or so since VF/3 merger I’ve noticed a huge improvement and barely use my EE backup SIM to the point where I’m thinking of ditching it completely.