Opensignal Examines 5G Speeds at EE and Vodafone UK vs Rivals

Opensignal has taken another brief look at 10 mobile operators offering 5G based mobile broadband speeds in the UK, USA, South Korea and Australia to see how their performance compares. Overall even the early 5G deployments are significantly faster than 4G, but download speeds at EE and Vodafone are trailing a bit.

The reason for their focus on just ten operators is because those all launched their commercial 5G service roughly six months or more ago, which is why we don’t get any data for O2 or Three UK (they’re much more recent). The measurements for these results were all taken between 31st January and 30th April 2020 (we assume they’ve included operators by counting back 6 months+ from January).

As you might expect, given the limited availability of such new networks, most consumers with a 5G capable Smartphone still spend the vast majority of time connected to their operator’s older 4G network. For example, in the UK, Vodafone has a 5G availability score of just 4.4% and EE hits 6.1%. The operator with the highest 5G availability is T-Mobile (USA) on 19.8%, while the weakest was Verizon (USA) on just 0.5%.

The analysis itself found that all ten operators saw much faster speeds for their users on 5G compared with 4G, with speeds between 18.4 times and 1.7 times faster on 5G. However, average 5G download speeds also varied widely, ranging between 506.1Mbps on Verizon down to 47Mbps on T-Mobile in the USA. The two UK operators were in the bottom half of an admittedly very small table.

As usual there are some big caveats to all of these differences, which might have shown up better had Opensignal included more details for each operator in order to give the correct context, not least in respect to network coverage and spectrum band allocations. The absence of any information about upload performance and latency is also a touch disappointing.

For example, in the UK, EE and Vodafone can only access a small slice of 40-50MHz spectrum frequency in the 3.4GHz band, while other countries can harness multiple bands to deliver faster speeds. Similarly the two USA operators with the slowest 5G speeds – T-Mobile and AT&T – could only access a smaller chunk via lower bands at 600MHz and 850MHz respectively.

Many early 5G networks are still in their infancy, can lack key features (may vary between countries) and have only very limited levels of coverage (usually centred on busy urban areas). Lest we forget that app-based 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 establish a solid baseline of performance.

Nevertheless Opensignal are one of the better outfits at putting such data together.