Three UK Come Top in Roaming Mobile Broadband Performance Study

Mobile operator Three UK has been named the best overall provider in this year’s Broadband Genie Road Trip 2012 study, which tested all of the five main Mobile Broadband operators (plus Virgin Mobile) for reliability and performance while roaming on a 2:30hr trip from King’s Cross to Exeter in England.

Overall Three UK came top, although both T-Mobile and Vodafone were still awarded ‘Recommended‘ status. Sadly Orange UK, O2 and Virgin Mobile didn’t do quite as well. A summary from some of the more interesting results can be found below, though the full analysis goes into a lot more detail.

Average Roaming Download Speed (Megabits)
1. Three UK 1.93Mbps
2. Orange UK 1.66Mbps
3. T-Mobile 1.49Mbps
4. Vodafone 1.31Mbps
5. O2 1.2Mbps
6. Virgin Mobile 0.97Mbps

Average Roaming Upload Speed
1. Orange UK 1.93Mbps
2. Three UK 1.09Mbps
3. T-Mobile 0.93Mbps
4. Virgin Mobile 0.83Mbps
5. Vodafone 0.75Mbps
6. O2 0.37Mbps

As usual it’s important to point out that Mobile Broadband is a highly variable service and your experiences will no doubt vary. Stationary surfing is also likely to result in faster speeds and more stability, at least it usually will in urban areas where coverage is good and when capacity load is low.

Similarly the quality of the operators USB Modem (Dongle) can also play a part in connection stability and performance, although the services inherent variability would make it inherently more challenging to irrefutably establish any related trends between different devices.