A joint study from Which? and OpenSignal has revealed that actual coverage of 4G (LTE) mobile in the United Kingdom is poor, although EE (BT) managed to deliver the best 4G reach and Three UK came top for Mobile Broadband speed. But GiffGaff is still the highest rated by consumers.
Overall 31,525 members of OpenSignal managed to produce over 60 million data samples between 1st Nov 2015 and 31st Jan 2016, which revealed that mobile customers in the UK were only able to access the latest 4G services just 53% of the time on average across all of the four primary networks and for the rest of the time they were dropped back to slower 3G (HSPA+) services.
The result is said to mark “a particularly poor showing” because it’s noted that at least 39 other countries offered coverage of 60% or greater, which puts us behind the likes of Kazakhstan and Pakistan. On the flip side South Korea tends to deliver the best 4G coverage with a score of 97%, which isn’t surprising as they’re also home to some of the best fixed line broadband networks.
Richard Lloyd, Which? Executive Director, said:
“Almost everyone now uses a mobile phone service and it’s not good enough that the UK is lagging behind so many countries with our 4G network coverage. Increasing 4G access should be a priority for mobile providers and Ofcom must continue to push them to make this a reality.”
On the other hand it’s important to reflect that 4G networks were slow to roll-out in the United Kingdom, largely due to a mix of regulatory linked legal threats and political squabbles that delayed the process for several years.
However EE does claim to deliver the best UK outdoor 4G coverage of 95%, largely because they had a year’s head-start on the roll-out via the 1800MHz band, and understandably they also come top in the survey, albeit with an actual coverage score of just 60.60%.
Top UK Mobile Operators (Network Performance)
Coverage: 4G
1. EE 60.60%
2. Vodafone 57.21%
3. O2 55.97%
4. Three UK 39.77%Download Speed: 3G
1. Three UK 4.91Mbps
2. Vodafone 4.39Mbps
3. EE 4.03Mbps
4. O2 3.05MbpsDownload Speed: 4G
1. Three UK 18.66Mbps
2. EE 17.84Mbps
3. O2 12.06Mbps
4. Vodafone 11.76MbpsLatency: 3G (milliseconds)
1. Three UK 98.19ms
2. EE 98.89ms
3. Vodafone 103.22ms
4. O2 123.92msLatency: 4G (milliseconds)
1. Three UK 53.03ms
2. EE 53.63ms
3. Vodafone 64.44ms
4. O2 78.66ms
Separately Which? also conducted a consumer satisfaction study on some of the markets main Mobile Network Operators (MNO) and MVNOs, which was based on the responses from 4,101 of their members during February 2016. Amazingly GiffGaff picked up the top network award for the second year running with a customer satisfaction score of 79% and they were followed by Asda Mobile (72%).
Meanwhile Lebara, Vodafone and EE could all be found sitting at the bottom on a dismally tied score of 49%. Elsewhere the middle ground was occupied by Three UK (61%) and O2 (60%).
Alex Neill, Director of Which? Campaigns and Communications, said: “The major mobile providers are still failing on the basics of customer service. Telecoms are an essential part of modern life and so providers need to start delivering for their customers.”
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