The Fastest UK Mobile Broadband Operators in London – 2014 vs 2013

RootMetrics has published its latest biannual study of Mobile Broadband (3G and 4G) performance across the city of London (England), which conducted 88,670 tests during March 2014 to reveal that EE still deliver the fastest download (17.8Mbps) and upload (9.3Mbps) speeds. But rivals O2, Three UK and Vodafone are improving.

As usual there are some caveats to the RootMetrics data, such as the fact that they don’t separate the performance of 3G and 4G networks in order to give a more balanced perspective. On the other hand all four mobile operators now have fully active 4G networks in London, although EE’s platform still appears to be the most advanced and thus unsurprisingly also the fastest.

It’s interesting to compare these results with the same study conducted one year ago, which was also before the new 4G networks came online from Three UK, O2 and Vodafone. Naturally all of the operators have since improved their download performance, with Vodafone and O2 being particularly strong, but Three UK seems to be failing to keep pace.

Sadly most of EE’s rivals have still struggled to improve upstream speeds above their 2013 levels, although Vodafone and O2 have again shown more of an improvement than Three UK. But we should reflect that Three UK were also the last to launch their 4G services (note: at no extra cost) and they even offer an “all-you-can-eat” data option that may be sucking up capacity.

Average Mobile Speeds in London (2013)
1. EE (Download: 13.6Mbps Upload:8.4Mbps)
2. Three UK (Download: 5.5Mbps Upload: 1.8Mbps)
3. Vodafone (Download: 4.8Mbps Upload: 1.4Mbps)
4. O2 (Download: 3.2Mbps Upload: 1.2Mbps)

In terms of network reliability, EE come joint top with Three UK on a score of 93.7 out of 100 and they’re followed by O2 with 88.8 and Vodafone on 87.1. In addition, everybody scored strongly for calls and text performance.