Tutela Reveals UK 4G Mobile Broadband Speeds by Time of Day

The crowd-sourced data experts from Tutela Technologies have kindly furnished ISPreview with some new data that reveals the ‘Average Subscriber Time on 4G‘ across different parts of the United Kingdom and how 3G and 4G data speeds are impacted at different times of the day (split by operator).

The new data complements Tutela’s recent mobile performance study (here) and provides some additional insight. For example, the ‘Download Speed by Time of Day‘ chart reveals once again that EE delivers the fastest overall 3G and 4G based Mobile download speeds, although it also confirms that all operators follow a fairly unsurprising performance trend.

As you’d expect the fastest download speeds of the day occur at between 3am to 5am for all operators, which is the time when most of the United Kingdom is fast asleep and thus networks are only under minimal load. By comparison the slowest speeds are experienced during the busy daytime and evening hours when most people are likely to be online. So far, so predictable, but it’s useful to see it being visualised like this.

Recently EE committed to introduce an additional ‘Time on 4G‘ measure to their network coverage metrics (here), which aimed to reveal the percentage of time a customer is connected to their 4G network. At the time EE claimed that the average ‘Time on 4G’ for customers in an urban area, with 4G Calling enabled, is 96%. In some rural areas, that figure is 79%, falling to 70% for a customer that isn’t using 4G Calling.

Crucially EE’s data source stems from their vast customer base (tens of millions), while Tutela’s data is limited to their UK panel of around 150,000 users across all of the primary network operators (this is gathered from various Smartphone apps that conduct background tests on mobile networks). The company has also excluded the results from mobile devices which are not 4G capable.

In the graph below Tutela took the results for 1) the top 10 largest cities only; 2) all UK and 3) all UK excluding the top 10 cities. They did this to shed some insight on how different operators are prioritising investment between the most populated cities versus other areas, which seems most significant for Three UK and Vodafone which showed the largest deltas.

Interestingly the ‘all UK excluding the top 10 cities’ result isn’t that far off EE’s official figure for rural areas, although they score significantly lower than the officially claimed 96% when only looking at the top 10 cities (urban areas). O2 also does quite well in the results below.