Opensignal – Avg. UK 5G Mobile Broadband Speeds Hit 138Mbps

Crowd-sourced analyst firm Opensignal has today released some updated benchmarks of early 5G based mobile broadband network deployments across several countries, which shows that average download speeds in the UK have reached 138Mbps – way above 4G on 24.9Mbps and WiFi on 34.1Mbps. But other countries are faster.

As usual there are some caveats to this sort of information. For example, app-based crowd-sourced data 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. Nevertheless Opensignal are one of the better outfits at putting such data together.

Furthermore we have to highlight the context of current deployments. Firstly, 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 its claimed capabilities (this varies between operators and counties).

One other big factor below is that, in the UK at least, most operators currently only have access to a smaller 40-50MHz slice of the 3.4GHz radio spectrum band, which is a hugely limiting factor for 5G speeds. Ofcom were due to auction off more of this but they’ve had to delay that process due to COVID-19 and we no longer know when it will take place (likely to occur later this year).

In short, it’s currently quite tricky to compare 5G performance between countries without also understanding what bands have been made available, as well as the coverage aspects of each market. Nevertheless few will be surprised to find that 5G is clearly faster, even without access to lots of spectrum, than 4G and WiFi combined.. except in the USA.

Opensignal claims that WiFi is faster in the USA because a lot of mobile operators have so far only deployed 5G using low frequency bands, which don’t have enough spare frequency to deliver good performance. In fairness the maximum speeds (not shown above) in the USA are actually significantly faster than this because they have deployed higher frequency mmW bands too, but those are only useful for short range coverage (e.g. busy shopping areas) or fixed wireless links.

Sadly looking at average speeds tells us only part of the story. It’s equally important to understand how often a user will enjoy that faster 5G service. “When we compared the time 5G users connect to 5G — we call this 5G Availability — we found it varied between 34.9% of time in Kuwait down to 5.2% in the UK,” said Opensignal. This is hardly surprising since the new networks have only just begun to roll-out and have very limited coverage. Likewise most consumers do not yet own a 5G capable Smartphone or router device.

Sadly the analyst misses an opportunity here to include some data about upload speeds and latency times.