EE Beats O2, Vodafone and Three UK to Top Opensignal Study

The latest October 2019 Mobile Network Experience report from Opensignal, which used crowd-sourced data to test 4G and 3G based UK Mobile (Mobile Broadband) performance, has once again named EE as the best overall operator as it beat arch rivals Vodafone, O2 and Three UK in almost every single category.

As usual the report is based on crowd-sourced data that was gathered via users of their app between 1st June and 29th August 2019, which included 9,671,508 measurements via 93,482 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 91.2% on EE (up from 86.77% last year), followed by 85.7% on O2 (up from 83.24%), 84.2% on Vodafone (up from 80.26%) and just 76.2% on Three UK (up from 73.18%).

Meanwhile 4G based Mobile Broadband speeds generally improved a little across the board. However we should add that this study is too recent for the latest 5G based ultrafast mobile broadband services to have an impact, although we’ll be expecting some solid results from that next year.

Generally the only category where EE didn’t come top was for “Voice App Experience” (i.e. WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger), which saw Vodafone take the crown but only by a fairly small margin. Below we’ve attempted to include the latest results and show how they’ve changed since last year (we’ve opted to only focus on the metrics for mobile data performance).

October 2019 vs 2018 Mobile Results (4G Only)

Network Availability
1. EE 91.2% (86.77%)
2. O2 85.7% (83.24%)
3. Vodafone 84.2% (80.26%)
4. Three UK 76.2% (73.18%)

Download Speed
1. EE 33.7Mbps (28.9Mbps)
2. Vodafone 25.1Mbps (21.92Mbps)
3. Three UK 21.6Mbps (18.78Mbps)
4. O2 16.9Mbps (14.61Mbps)

Upload Speed
1. EE 8.9Mbps (9.3Mbps)
2. Vodafone 7.8Mbps (8.02Mbps)
3. Three UK 7.4Mbps (7.97Mbps)
4. O2 5.7Mbps (6.55Mbps)

Latency (Milliseconds – lower is better)
1. EE 37.3ms (39.77ms)
2. O2 37.4ms (42.38ms)
3. Vodafone 39.4ms (40.78ms)
4. Three UK 46.3ms (48.15ms)

As usual there are some caveats to consider. For example, some operators have better 4G coverage, lots of spectrum bands and a more advanced network than others (EE). Crowd-sourced data can also 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 form a solid baseline of performance.

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 such data.