EE and Three Battle for Title of UK Fastest Mobile Broadband Operator

Mirror mirror on the wall.. RootMetrics has today published their “midyear” (H1-2014) report into mobile operator performance across the United Kingdom, which has seen O2, EE, Three UK and Vodafone all battle it out over areas including service reliability, call / text performance and Mobile Broadband speeds for Internet access.

Sadly the full report, which is based on 920,346 tests conducted over 25,522 miles across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, appears to make some of the same mistakes as earlier updates by failing to separate out 3G and 4G network performance and not stating the service speeds in Megabits per second (Mbps). Readers must instead attempt to guess the performance of each provider based on a very general ‘1 to 100 points’ system.

Generally there’s not a lot to choose between the operators in terms of call and text performance, with almost all scoring around the 85-90 points mark.

However the story in terms of reliability and mobile Internet performance is a little bit different (see the right-hand illustration for the United Kingdom’s overall results), with EE and Three UK battling it out at the top and Vodafone left to languish at the bottom with O2 sitting nearby.

Being ISPreview.co.uk we’re naturally more interested in Mobile Internet (broadband) performance and so we’ve taken a closer look at that particular aspect across the different states of the United Kingdom below.

England
1. EE (86.8)
2. Three UK (83.2)
3. O2 (69.4)
4. Vodafone (69.1)

Wales
1. Three UK (80.6)
2. EE (80.6)
3. Vodafone (56.3)
4. O2 (53.8)

Scotland
1. Three UK (81.4)
2. EE (76.1)
3. O2 (58.5)
4. Vodafone (56.2)

N.Ireland
1. EE (85.8)
2. Three UK (80.0)
3. O2 (51.9)
4. Vodafone (49.6)

As ever it’s no real surprise to find EE dominating in England, which is the largest of all the states and also where the operator has rolled out most of their “superfast” 4G (LTE) network. EE’s 4G platform has also benefitted from having a year’s head start by virtue of being able to use the existing 1800MHz radio spectrum band, while the rest had to wait many months for Ofcom’s auction of the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands to conclude.

But having said that it’s interesting to note that Three UK, which was also the last to introduce a 4G service at the very end of 2013, has managed to tie EE in Wales and beat them in Scotland. Equally Three UK also manages to come within only a few points of EE’s score for England and N.Ireland, which is surprising given how far ahead EE has been in previous studies.

In terms of ‘Megabits per second’, all we can do is recommend that readers take a look at RootMetric’s recent city report for Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester in England (here). Unlike today’s report we did manage to get both upload and download results for those, which curiously showed O2 to be in a much more commanding position than they hold in today’s study.

We expect the balance to level out as EE’s rivals slowly reach a similar lever of 4G coverage.