Opensignal Find UK Still Slowest for 5G Mobile Broadband Speeds

Crowd-sourced analyst firm Opensignal has today updated their early real-world benchmarks of 5G based mobile broadband networks across 12 countries (i.e. those that have launched the service), which reveals that the United Kingdom remains the slowest of the early adopter countries (599Mbps UK vs 1815Mbps USA).

Opensignal’s original study in July was only based on data gathered between 1st April to 30th June 2019 (here), which meant that for the UK they were only including results from EE’s early network. By comparison the latest update has added several more countries (12 vs the original 8) and the data period has been extended to 1st September 2019 (i.e. likely to be including a little data from Vodafone and Three UK’s recent launches).

The fact that the UK comes bottom of the table with an average download speed of 599Mbps (up slightly from 569Mbps in July) is not exactly a positive outcome, although there are some important caveats to consider and these appear to be shared by other European operators (Spain, Romania, Germany and Italy show similar performance).

Obviously these are tentative early deployments with limited coverage and few users (small data samples). Likewise Ofcom has only released the 3.4GHz spectrum band for use in UK 5G services (more will be auctioned off in 2020). By comparison the top countries are able to harness several bands simultaneously (Carrier Aggregation), including some mmWave bands, which tends to result in much better urban speeds.

Admittedly Three UK has a lot more spectrum than their rivals in the 3.4GHz band (i.e. 100MHz vs 40-50MHz) but they only went live on 19th August and so aren’t yet likely to have had any a real impact below (here). On this point we wish Opensignal would split the results by each operator.

As above, we must not lose sight of the fact that none of the early 5G networks have many real-world customers (i.e. low network congestion – not very reflective of eventual take-up) and the initial hardware being deployed doesn’t always support all of 5G’s claimed capabilities. Suffice to say that 5G is in its infancy and when 4G first went live it wasn’t all that much faster than 3G, but that did change.

As usual there are other caveats to this sort of crowd-sourced data. For example, app-based crowd-sourced data such as this could be impacted by any limitations of the devices being used, which at the same time removes the ability to adopt a common type of hardware in order to establish a solid baseline of performance.