Comparison of UK 5G Mobile Broadband Speeds and Operators

Telecoms analyst firm Point Topic has published the results of a new study, which examined how 4G and 5G based mobile broadband speeds compare across the United Kingdom and between different operators. Overall EE appeared to deliver the best speed, but Vodafone or Three UK are close behind.

The new research appears to be based off data collected via Thinkbroadband’s web-based speed test, which reflects a 4G sample size of 37,665 tests and a small 5G sample of just 3,141 tests gathered during the 12-months to September 2020. The report has also opted to “regard actual download speeds of 100Mbps+ on mobile networks as 5G,” which seems like a flaky way of separating the technologies (4G networks is some areas, and at certain times of day, can go above 100Mbps).

One other oddity is that Point Topic has set the “theoretical maximum download speeds” for 5G tech at 10-50Gbps, which is fine for the far-off future (not yet achievable), but for 4G they’ve only chosen 300Mbps, even though the LTE Advanced standard puts the downstream peak at 1Gbps. A few years ago we saw EE demonstrating speeds above 400Mbps (example) but, admittedly, such speeds are incredibly rare in a real-world environment.

Otherwise, the study found that average (mean) 5G speeds are currently about 3-4 times faster than existing 4G networks, which is better than it sounds since most operators are mainly harnessing a 40-50MHz slice of spectrum frequency in the 3.4GHz band (Three UK can use a lot more but they don’t yet seem to fully benefit). The results are roughly consistent with other studies we’ve seen from Ookla (here) and opensignal (here).

We should point out that existing 5G networks can also dynamically harness some 4G spectrum, but this is not the most efficient mode of 5G delivery.

4G and 5G UK Speeds Compared

At this point it’s noted that 69.1% of all 5G mobile speed tests in the sample were below 150Mbps, while 28% were measured at between 151-300Mbps, then just 2.6% came in at 301-450Mbps and only 0.3% could muster a result around 451-753Mbps.

UK 5G Mobile Operators Compared

Interestingly Three UK does manage to deliver the fastest average (mean) download speed for 5G, although when looking at a median average they fall away a bit and their max recorded speed is nowhere near EE’s. The table, being ordered by a median average, sees EE come top but it’s clearly very close between EE, Vodafone and Three UK. Sadly, O2 is not fairing so well.

We should point out that many early 5G networks are also still in their infancy, can lack key features (varies between countries and operators) and have only very limited levels of coverage (usually centred on busy urban areas). Mobile networks are, by nature, also highly variable (end-users and their environment are constantly changing) and that makes it quite tricky to get an accurate gauge on performance.

We can see the fabled gigabit speeds becoming possible via 5G in the future (within the UK), but that’s most likely to be of benefit to urban areas, while rural locations tend to prefer lower frequency bands for wide cost-effective coverage (i.e. less spectrum is available and that will make it hard to achieve gigabit speeds).