EE Still the Fastest Network for 4G Mobile Broadband Speeds in London UK

The latest preliminary RootMetrics study of Mobile Broadband performance in London (England), which conducted more than 11,000 tests across the city, has revealed that EE continues to deliver the best Internet speeds despite the recent launch of O2 and Vodafone’s new 4G (LTE) based networks.

The research splits two charts to show the performance of all technologies (3G and 4G), as well as 4G-only speeds. The first 3G/4G chart is arguably more representative of normal performance because you won’t always be able to get a 4G connection. Indeed RootMetric’s said they were able to connect to each operator’s 4G network “at least 63% of the time” during testing.

Overall EE comes top with a 3G/4G rate of 22.7Mbps (download) and a 4G-only speed of 29.6Mbps, which isn’t surprising because EE recently began rolling out their double speed upgrade that boosted the amount of 1800MHz radio spectrum bandwidth dedicated to their LTE network from 10MHz to 20MHz at each cell (here).

RootMetrics added:

“But we did measure each network’s maximum speeds while purely on 4G. While EE easily had the fastest maximum upload speed, the maximum speeds we found from O2 and Vodafone were very impressive. EE hit a maximum download speed of 79.1 Mbps, O2 clocked in at 65.8 Mbps, and Vodafone hit a maximum download speed of 57.7 Mbps. In terms of maximum upload speed, EE had the fastest speed at 49.1 Mbps, while O2’s maximum upload speed was 23.7 Mbps, and Vodafone’s maximum upload speed was 23.6 Mbps.”

On the other hand O2 and Vodafone’s 4G network has only just launched and we’d thus expect their performance to slip as more users begin to fill-up the capacity, although LTE has been well designed for capacity management. But perhaps the best thing to note here is that an average of 16Mbps+ is still above Ofcom’s UK average for fixed line broadband ISPs (14.7Mbps).

Now, about those meagre data allowances..