The Top 16 UK Cities for Mobile Broadband Speeds Ranked – H1 2016

RootMetrics have today published their latest report into the Mobile Broadband (3G and 4G) performance of network operators EE, Three UK, O2 and Vodafone across 16 of the United Kingdom’s primary cities. Overall Liverpool came top of the table, while Hull is still stuck at the bottom.

The Scottish city of Edinburgh also deserves a special mention for showing the best improvement, jumping six places from 9th to 3rd since the last H2 – 2015 report. Meanwhile London improved slightly, rising from 13th to the respectable position of 10th.

Mobile operators EE, O2 and Three UK all recorded increases to their median Internet download speeds in London, with the most noticeable improvement being EE’s increase from 23.7Mbps to 29.8Mbps (this is explained by their on-going roll-out of “ultrafast” Cat 6 and 9 LTE-Advanced technology). In addition, all operators recorded slight increases to median upload speeds.

Scott Stonham, RootMetrics General Manager for Europe, said:

“Despite not coming first in any individual category, Liverpool’s high performance across all categories has secured it the top spot overall in our weighted averaged rankings. Yet it’s not just Liverpool that is showing improvement. Our capitals are showing great promise, with Edinburgh rising into the top five, Belfast finishing in the top two in the country and London’s improvements.”

Sadly the news is not so good for Glasgow, Cardiff and Hull, which all received the lowest weighted average mobile performance scores, and their #14, #15 and #16 rankings are mostly unchanged from H2 2015.

RootMetrics do not split the individual city results to show the performance differences between older 3G and newer 4G (LTE) networks on each of the operators, although most operators now have 4G coverage across the majority of each city and so this should be less of a concern than it was last year.

Operator Median Download Speeds in Mbps (vs 2H 2015)

Operator Median Upload Speeds in Mbps (vs 2H 2015)

Now here’s a quick summary of the overall ranking (score out of 100) before we delve into the speeds for each operator in each city. The overall performance rankings were calculated from nearly 395,000 test samples and more than 14,000 miles driven in the 16 UK metros during the first half of 2016.

The overall performance scores are a combination of reliability and speed results from data, call, and text testing. However the press release does not elaborate on what hardware combinations were used for the testing.

Consumers should also keep in mind that some operators, such as Three UK, have a larger proportion of data hungry users on their “all-you-can-eat” tariffs and this may impact their performance due to a higher degree of network congestion.