OpenSignal Ranks UK 30th in the World for Mobile Download Speed

A recent update from OpenSignal, which uses crowd-sourced data to examine Mobile Network Operator (MNO) performance, has revealed that the United Kingdom ranks just 30th in the world for average mobile broadband download speed (19.01Mbps). By comparison South Korea came top (45.58Mbps) and India bottom (5.63Mbps).

Overall the group examined 69 countries (definitely not the whole world) and as part of that they took 87,011,812,678 measurements via 8 million devices (e.g. those with their OpenSignal app installed) between 14th May and 11th August 2018. The speed that resulted reflects an average across both 3G and 4G data connections.

Sadly this revealed that the UK had fallen below many other EU countries, particularly the big economic powers of Germany, France and Spain. On the other hand we did beat Italy, the USA and Ireland.

As usual there are always caveats to consider. For example, some operators have better 4G coverage, lots of spectrum bands and a more advanced network than those in other countries. Similarly other operators may deliver slower speeds because they suffer more strain on their capacity (network congestion) due affordable “unlimited” style mobile data plans.

Lest we forget that app-based crowd-sourced data could also be affected by any limitations with the device being used, which also removes the ability to adopt a common type of hardware in order to form a solid baseline of performance. Suffice to say that performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story, but OpenSignal does tend to be one of the better organisations at analysing such information.

We must also remember that other countries will have to contend with the same sort of problems, although in the case of South Korea it certainly doesn’t hurt that all those mobile cells will have access to a decent fibre optic link to feed their capacity needs.