RootMetrics Reveals 5G Mobile Broadband Speeds in Cardiff UPDATE

RootMetrics has today published their second report into the tentative initial availability and mobile broadband performance of 5G Mobile networks, albeit this time focused upon the city of Cardiff in Wales. Overall EE UK came top for both average download speeds (163.1Mbps) and network availability (43.4%).

As with the earlier report for Birmingham (here), we have to point out that there are some caveats to the data, not least with how the testing was conducted between 26th September and 2nd October 2019 (i.e. before Three UK and O2 had launched their 5G mobile networks in the city). As a result of that only EE and Vodafone were included and the former has had more time to rollout (i.e. at this stage comparing availability is a little pointless).

On top of that the testing in Cardiff was only based on the team having driven 134 miles, including tests via 10 indoor locations and 10,070 total tests conducted via both a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G (EE) and Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G (Vodafone) smartphone. The fact that they used a different phone for each network also opens up the possibility of differences due to end-user hardware or antenna design etc.

Overall EE’s 5G network had availability of 43.4% to Vodafone’s 14%. In terms of Mobile Broadband speeds the results are below, although it’s worth remembering that early 5G networks don’t have many users (low congestion) and are somewhat hobbled by their ability to access a single slice of the 3.4GHz band (EE has a 40MHz slice and Vodafone 50MHz). Ofcom will auction off more bands in 2020 and that will have a big impact upon speed.

Non-5G (4G/3G) Median Download Speeds in Cardiff
1. EE 58.8Mbps
2. Vodafone 37.1Mbps
3. Three UK 13.9Mbps
4. O2 8.2Mbps

5G Median Download Speeds in Cardiff
1. EE 163.1Mbps
2. Vodafone 113.6Mbps

Sadly there are no results for upload or latency performance, which is a missed opportunity. Nevertheless the most reasonable conclusion that we can draw at this early stage is that initial 5G networks are delivering at least more than double the performance of prior 4G networks. This is actually better than it sounds given how 4G has access to multiple bands via Carrier Aggregation and 5G does not.. yet.

A separate report from Opensignal, using different methodology, has already given us an indication of just how fast we can expect 5G networks to go once they have access to the best spectrum in the near future (here). Ideally we really need to allow another year for 5G to rollout further before testing starts to become truly useful as a tool for performance comparisons.

UPDATE 6th Nov 2019

RootMetrics informs us that, in terms of the choice of phone for testing, their goal is to assure that testing is reflective of the best possible end-user experience on each operator’s network. “To that end, we go through an extensive device benchmark process to determine which phone works best for each network rather than using the same device across all operators by default,” said the spokesperson.

In this case, the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G was the best device for testing EE, while the Xiaomi device was the best device for Vodafone’s network.