nPerf Ranks EE Top in 2021 Benchmark of UK Mobile Networks

French company nPerf has today published the results of their annual crowd-sourced data study into UK mobile broadband (4G, 5G) performance, which finds that EE has unseated rival Vodafone from last year’s top spot and is now named as the best operator across most of the performance categories.

In this study nPerf’s results appear to be based off 133,408 connection tests (including speed, web browsing and streaming tests), which were made via their dedicated mobile app (iOS, Android). The data was then aggregated to establish a performance benchmark (i.e. the final results are based off 96,712 relevant tests performed by 11,350 users).

The nPerf score goal aims to reflect the customer experience and is based on the “five most important” KPI’s (download speed, upload speed, latency, streaming and browsing). As usual there are caveats to this sort of crowd-sourced data, such as the fact that it could be impacted by any limitations of the devices being used and it hampers the ability to adopt a common type of hardware in order to establish a solid baseline of performance.

Last year (2020) saw Vodafone pick-up the win with a total of 78,284 nPoints (here) and strong results across the key categories (e.g. average speeds of 50.35Mbps download and 13.66Mbps upload etc.). By comparison the winner in 2021 has been named as EE, which scored a total of 78,297 nPoints (e.g. average speeds of 59.80Mbps download and 12.38Mbps upload etc.).

Meanwhile Three UK was the most improved operator overall and saw their nPoints score jump from 57,223 last year to 64,397 this year, with big gains in internet speed and latency performance. By comparison O2 hasn’t changed much over the past 12 months.