The latest October 2018 report from OpenSignal, which uses crowd-sourced data to test 4G and 3G based UK Mobile (Mobile Broadband) network performance, has revealed that EE is continuing to hoover up most of the awards for mobile download speed, upload speed, latency and availability.
The group’s Mobile Networks UK update is based on app-based crowd-sourced data that was gathered between 1st June and 29th August 2018, which included 1,104,989,130 measurements via 76,939 test devices (e.g. Smartphones). Overall this found that 4G network availability (i.e. the proportion of time OpenSignal users have an LTE connection) was 86.77% on EE, followed by 83.24% on O2, 80.26% on Vodafone and just 73.18% on Three UK.
Meanwhile 4G based Mobile Broadband speeds held fairly steady in the UK, although EE, Three UK and O2 did suffer a mild loss of performance since the last report in April 2018. Meanwhile O2 seems to be performing quite poorly overall, although we expect them to improve as they expand the reach of their new 4G friendly 2.3GHz radio spectrum band.
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October 2018 vs April 2018 Mobile Results (Apr Results)
Network Availability: 4G
1. EE 86.77% (86.62%)
2. O2 83.24% (83.67%)
3. Vodafone 80.26% (79.45%)
4. Three UK 73.18% (66.64%)Download Speed: 4G
1. EE 28.9Mbps (29.02Mbps)
2. Vodafone 21.92Mbps (20.07Mbps)
3. Three UK 18.78Mbps (22.55Mbps)
4. O2 14.61Mbps (15.16Mbps)Download Speed: 3G
1. Three UK 7.82Mbps (6.95Mbps)
2. EE 7.17Mbps (7.78Mbps)
3/4. Vodafone 4.58Mbps (5.24Mbps) tied
3/4. O2 4.58Mbps (4.76Mbps) tiedUpload Speed: 4G (no April results)
1. EE 9.3Mbps
2. Vodafone 8.02Mbps
3. Three UK 7.97Mbps
4. O2 6.55MbpsLatency: 4G (Milliseconds – lower is better)
1. EE 39.77ms (40.35ms)
2. Vodafone 40.78ms (40.6ms)
3. O2 42.38ms (42.84ms)
4. Three UK 48.15ms (47.23ms)Latency: 3G (Milliseconds – lower is better)
1. EE 60.98ms (65.8ms)
2. Vodafone 62.52ms (66.81ms)
3. Three UK 64.11ms (71.91ms)
4. O2 73.76ms (80.64ms)
The following chart shows the regional winners in each category that OpenSignal measured.
As usual there are some caveats to consider with this report. For example, some operators have better 4G coverage, lots of spectrum bands and a more advanced network than others. Similarly other operators may deliver slower speeds because they suffer more strain on their capacity (network congestion) due cheaper “unlimited” style mobile data plans (e.g. Three UK).
App-based crowd-sourced data could also be affected by any limitations with the users location or device being used, which can also remove 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 is one of the better organisations at analysing such data.
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