Rootmetrics – EE and Vodafone Named Best in Wales for Mobile

RootMetrics has today published the results from their latest H1 2020 study of 4G and 5G mobile network and mobile broadband performance conducted across Wales, which is based on over 156,000 scientific tests conducted during the first couple of months of 2020. Overall EE and Vodafone UK are neck and neck at the top

The report on this study is fairly brief and doesn’t offer much solid information on either their approach to testing this time (e.g. what Smartphones they used?) or the locations tested, although most (but not all) of their work tends to centre on or around big metropolitan areas like Cardiff.

At this stage the coverage of ultrafast 5G based mobile networks in Wales remains tiny and as such most of the results from this report are likely to reflect 4G and possibly some 3G based network results. Overall EE and Vodafone were neck and neck almost across the board and both returned an identical score of 93.3 out of 100 points.

In terms of mobile broadband speeds, EE just about managed to come top with an aggregate median download rate of 31.6Mbps, although hot on their tail was Vodafone with 30.8Mbps. After that we have to drop someway down to see the usual pair of Three UK on 13Mbps and O2 with 11.5Mbps at the bottom.

Vodafone appeared to show the most improvement this time and were “excellent across the board” in 1H 2020. “In our last round of testing, Vodafone won or shared two awards in Wales, but in 1H 2020, Vodafone won or shared all seven awards and improved its rankings from second place to first place in four categories: overall performance, network reliability, call performance, and text performance,” said the study.

Suffice to say that EE are now at risk of losing their hold on the top spot in Wales and we’ll be interested to see if Vodafone can continue their improvement when we come to the next H2 2020 study.