Netradar Finds UK Mobile Internet Speeds Slower than Most of Europe

Measurements of mobile Internet speed taken during the course of last year by UK and EU users of the free Netradar.org app have shown that the United Kingdom scored an average download rate of 5Mbps (Megabits per second), which places us below France (8.4Mbps), Germany (6.1Mbps), Italy (5.4Mbps) and many others. In addition, Three UK delivered the fastest speeds for Britain.

The Netradar application, which is developed and globally run by Aalto University in Finland, also revealed that the fastest Mobile Broadband connections in Europe were found in Denmark (22.3Mbps), Switzerland (16.6Mbps) and Norway (14.8Mbps). Meanwhile the slowest were Ukraine (0.3Mbps), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.0Mbps) and Moldova (1.8Mbps).

The study also noted that there were “remarkable differences” between the different British Mobile Network Operators (MNO). For example, the average downlink speed for Three UK was 6.3Mbps, while T-Mobile (EE) clients measured 5.6Mbps, Vodafone delivered 4.9Mbps, Orange UK’s (EE) users got 3.6Mbps and sadly O2 scored just 3.1Mbps.

It should be noted that such results can also be affected by package choice, the limitations of Smartphone and Tablet chipsets / modems (e.g. some don’t have 4G capable chips or use slow 3G to save battery etc.) and it’s not known how the different hardware choices or combinations across countries might impact these results.

Not to mention that modern devices often multi-task their data usage, which could also impact results if more than one app is using data. The balance of any rural vs urban bias or impact of local network congestion is also unknown.

In fact mobile performance is generally very difficult to pin down due to a wide variety of factors that may impact performance and so such tests should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Never the less it is still an interesting slice of data, albeit worth noting that separate reports from Akamai (here) and Ofcom (here) appear to be considerably more optimistic.

So far, the Netradar app has been installed almost 200,000 times and their database currently holds 5 million measurements from all around the globe.