GWS Find Improving 4G Mobile Network Signals on UK Motorways

A new report from Global Wireless Solutions has noted that mobile operators (O2, EE, Vodafone and Three UK) have “turbo boosted” their 4G coverage across major motorways in the UK since 2017, with the M6 seeing double what it had over a year and a half ago.

GWS conducted a series of tests to evaluate mobile network performance. Just over 2.6 million data and voice task tests were conducted to evaluate the primary operators in 38 major cities and towns during 2018. The tests were run using the GWS OneMeasure App running on iPhone devices, Rohde & Schwarz’s Freerider using Samsung Galaxy devices, and the GWS Mobistat data evaluation and reporting platform.

The testing didn’t just look at motorways and also gauged performance across various cities and towns. Overall O2 came top here in 17 markets tested, followed by Three UK. Meanwhile Vodafone improved their ranking over the course of the year and now shares third place with EE, who lost pole positions in Manchester, Leicester and Leeds to O2 and Three UK.

The results are interesting because they’re quite different from all of the other studies (using different methods) that we’ve seen from RootMetrics (here), OpenSignal (here), Tutela (here) and P3 (here) etc. In most of those O2 are definitely not a front runner and EE tends to fair the best, while in this case it’s the opposite. If anything this just goes to show that such reports are far from perfect, no matter how they’re conducted.

Elsewhere the change in motorway coverage has been significant. For example, the worst motorway in 2018 was the M23 with 90% 4G signal availability, whereas in early 2017 the best motorway on test was the M60 with only 82% 4G availability.

4G Coverage on Major UK Motorways 2018

GWS Reliability OneScore Winners by Market