Fastest 3G and 4G Mobile Operators for England, Scotland and Wales

A new crowd-sourced study of 3G and 4G based Mobile Broadband performance from Tutela has revealed how Three UK, O2, Vodafone and EE (BT) perform across England, Wales and Scotland, as well as generally for the whole of the United Kingdom. As usual EE retains the overall top spot.

The research was conducted by gathering anonymous usage data from the background of 1,500+ supporting Android and iOS based Smartphone apps (between 1st December 2017 and 28th February 2018), which produced a total of 4.81 billion measurements, 123 million records, 594,000 speedtests and 17.4 million response tests.

Overall EE comes top for Mobile Broadband speeds (25.8Mbps download), low latency (20ms) and packet loss (only 0.75%). On the flip side Vodafone and O2 seemed to be front runners for older 3G connections.

The regional split between England, Scotland and Wales also shows a few differences and for the purpose of this summary we’ll only focus on the 4G results, not least since there’s very little difference between the separate 3G figures for each operator (these largely reflect the above UK table) and it’s a similar story for 4G latency; although 3G latency remains highly variable (as above).

England

4G Download Speed

1. EE 25.93Mbps
2. Vodafone 20.54Mbps
3. 02 15.47Mbps
4. Three UK 11.26Mbps

4G Upload Speed

1. EE 8.42Mbps
2. Vodafone 7.69Mbps
3. O2 7.20Mbps
4. Three UK 6.58Mbps

Scotland

4G Download Speed

1. EE 25.86Mbps
2. Vodafone 19.98Mbps
3. 02 17.54Mbps
4. Three UK 12.22Mbps

4G Upload Speed

1. EE 8.13Mbps
2. 02 7.58Mbps
3. Vodafone 7.42Mbps
4. Three UK 6.80Mbps

Wales

4G Download Speed

1. EE 24.25Mbps
2. Vodafone 19.07Mbps
3. 02 16.43Mbps
4. Three UK 12.19Mbps

4G Upload Speed

1. Vodafone 8.01Mbps
2. EE 7.75Mbps
3. 02 7.08Mbps
4. Three UK 6.67Mbps

Sadly we can’t compare these results with previous studies from the same source because Tutela changed their methodology in January 2018, which now excludes the TCP handshake stage of a file transfer in order to measure the average speed during data transfers only (this tends to produce higher figures than throughput results).

Readers should also consider that some networks, such as EE, have better 4G coverage, more spectrum and a more advanced network setup than their rivals, although Vodafone aren’t far off them now. Similarly operators like Three UK may suffer more strain on their data capacity (network congestion) because of affordable “all-you-can-eat” style data plans.

Lest we forget that testing via non-dedicated apps may be less accurate than dedicate solutions (e.g. Opensignal) and crowd-sourced data could also be affected by any limitations of the device being used, which won’t have a common type of hardware for helping to form a solid baseline. Suffice to say that performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story but it’s still a useful bit of extra information to play with.