8 of the Most Popular UK Rail Transit Lines Ranked by Mobile Quality

A new RootMetrics study has ranked eight of the United Kingdom’s most popular rail transit lines by the quality of their on-board Mobile (3G and 4G) network connectivity. Overall those taking a train via the ‘London Paddington to Reading‘ route are likely to have the best experience.

All four operators are said to have delivered “excellent data and call reliability results” on the Paddington to Reading transit, and the operators’ data speeds were also generally strong across the board. However EE recorded the best Mobile Broadband speeds on the line, reaching a median download rate of 28.8Mbps and a median upload speed of 17.3Mbps.

Meanwhile the worst route for mobile connectivity was ‘London Waterloo to Southampton Central‘, which suffered from low network reliability, as well as slow median upload speeds from O2, Three UK and Vodafone. On top of that there were also problems with poor levels of blocked and dropped call rates from all four operators.

As usual RootMetrics have boiled their data down to a simple score of 0 to 100 (i.e. the higher the score, the better the performance) via several different categories. The overall results can be seen below.

In general EE registered the fastest median download speeds among all of the four primary operators and they won most of the potential awards, although Vodafone was said to have produced “generally strong speeds during testing” and they came second overall, followed by Three UK and then O2. In fact, Vodafone was one of two operators to record a median download speed faster than 10Mbps on any transit line.

In terms of Mobile Broadband speed, different operators did better or worse on different transit lines.

EE’s Best Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Paddington – Heathrow – 30.7 Mbps

EE’s Worst Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Euston – Glasgow Central – 5.9 Mbps

Vodafone’s Best Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Victoria – Brighton – 14.9 Mbps

Vodafone’s Worst Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Euston – Glasgow Central – 4.1 Mbps

Three UK’s Best Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Kings Cross – Cambridge Station- 7.8 Mbps

Three UK’s Worst Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Euston – Glasgow Central – 2.9 Mbps

O2’s Best Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Paddington – Heathrow – 8.8 Mbps

O2’s Worst Transit Line for Mobile Data Speed
London Euston – Glasgow Central – 2.0 Mbps

A separate survey conducted by Transport Focus earlier this year similarly revealed which train operators delivered the highest commuter satisfaction with the reliability of their on-board internet connection (here). Over Heathrow Express came top of that study, while Southeastern was pushed right to the bottom.

The UK government is currently consulting on proposals that could help to make WiFi and Mobile (5G) broadband speeds of 1Gbps available across all mainline train routes by 2025 (here), while operators in Scotland and Wales are working on similar enhancements.