The Fastest 16 UK Cities for Mobile Broadband Speed in H2 2020

A new report from mobile benchmarking firm RootMetrics has used the data they gathered for their previous H2 2020 study (here) to rank 16 of the United Kingdom’s largest and fastest cities by their average (median) download speed on 4G and 5G networks. Liverpool came top with an aggregate speed of 43.6Mbps.

The company typically uses a team of testers to walk and drive around each city while running tests via a set of regular Samsung Note 10+ 5G Smartphones. Using this method, they found that Vodafone clocked the fastest overall median download speed in Liverpool at 73.5Mbps, while EE earned honours in Birmingham on 79.5Mbps.

The 5G-only speeds in both of the top fastest cities were also excellent, with only one operator in either market posting a 5G speed below 112Mbps. But even then, Three UK’s 5G speed of 94.1Mbps in Birmingham was still nothing to sniff at. Sadly, the company doesn’t include a split of 4G vs 5G speeds by each city, instead we only get a general average below.

Overall, the difference between the aggregate speeds of the 4 fastest cites in the UK was minor, with a total difference of about 7Mbps separating them. That gap became much larger, however, when comparing Liverpool’s speed to those of some much bigger cities (e.g. Liverpool is about 10Mbps faster than that of London). But the gap extends to 20Mbps when comparing the top and bottom ranked cities.

Now, just for fun, below you can see how things have changed since last year’s (H2 2019) result. Every city has seen an improvement, although some have become a lot faster than others in H2 2020 above (partly down to the 5G roll-out).

Mobile speeds are of course incredibly difficult to pin down due to the highly variable nature of the technology. Users of such services are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor, underground etc.), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment (weather, trees, buildings etc.) is ever changeable.

On top of that different operators may have different levels of coverage, technologies, backhaul capacity for cell sites and spectrum bands. All of this can impact the service you receive and will vary from location to location.