2019 Report Ranks UK 27th in World for Mobile Broadband Speeds

The latest 2019 State of Mobile Network report from Opensignal has ranked the United Kingdom 27th out of 87 countries in the world for its average Mobile Broadband (3G / 4G) download speed (21.7Mbps), as well as 30th for upload speeds (7.4Mbps), 29th for latency times (46ms) and 26th for 4G network availability (84.7%).

As usual Opensignal’s information is based off crowd-sourced data, which was gathered from users of their Smartphone (Android and iOS) app between 1st January and 31st March 2019. Overall this involved a total of 43,614,234 devices and 139,960,248,468 measurements.

Admittedly there are caveats to this sort of data. For example, crowd-sourced data can be impacted by any limitations of the device(s) being used, which at the same time removes the ability to adopt a common type of hardware in order to form a solid baseline.

Suffice to say that performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story, but Opensignal are one of the better organisations at analysing it.

The Results

Countries in Europe were found to dominate (highest scores) most of the key metrics. For example, Norway and the Netherlands both delivered average download speeds of over 40Mbps and a further six European countries topped the 30Mbps mark.

Sadly only four European countries made the top ten for 4G Availability and some major markets, including Germany, Italy and France, were “distinctly mid-table with scores under 80%“. Meanwhile Asian Pacific countries, such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore, all did extremely well

It will be interesting to see how these countries do once ultrafast 5G services start rolling out this year. The UK is expected to be one of those that gets a head start, albeit with limited spectrum until 2020 onwards. Some other countries that claim to have started their 5G deployments already are actually using something more akin to 4G.

The Fastest Countries for Mobile (Q1 2019)