Tutela Study of UK 4G Mobile Broadband Speeds Ranks EE Top

Crowdsourced benchmarking firm Tutela has published their latest H1 2021 study of mobile broadband (4G and 3G) performance across the United Kingdom, which broadly finds that EE (BT) delivered the best download speeds and fastest latency times, although Vodafone came top for uploads.

The latest report is based on data from the February to April 2021 period, which saw the firm take over 46 billion measurements, including 4.17 million broadband speed tests (conducted via third-party apps on Smartphones, such as the iPhone 11 and Samsung S10+). Sadly, Tutela missed another opportunity to include data from the latest 5G networks, which is a bit of a disappointment.

We must stress that any testing conducting via non-dedicated apps like this could be less accurate than dedicated ones (e.g. opensignal). Crowdsourced data can also be affected by the user’s location, as well as any limitations of the device being used, and it similarly lacks a common type of hardware (useful when trying to form a solid scientific baseline). Nevertheless, there’s still some useful data to be found in Tutela’s study.

As usual, Tutela starts off by producing a “Consistent Quality” (CQ) score for each operator, which reflects the percentage (%) of tests in common coverage areas that meet their CORE and EXCELLENT service thresholds – CORE reflects moderately-intensive tasks (i.e. web browsing, social media, SD video streaming), while EXCELLENT reflects more demanding use (i.e. HD video streaming, Skype video calls, online video gaming etc.).

Overall, EE came top for CQ with an ‘Excellent’ score of 76.8% and a ‘Core’ score of 92.7%. On top of that, they also delivered the fastest average (median) download speed of 30.6Mbps, the quickest latency time of 11.7 milliseconds (median one-way latency time via UDP) and the strongest 4G availability score of 91.5% (i.e. the % time users spent connected to 4G). But Vodafone still delivered the fastest upload speed at 11Mbps.