Testing 5G Speeds in Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle

Mobile benchmark firm RootMetrics has just published a new summary of their latest 5G based UK mobile broadband speed and availability testing across the four primary network operators – EE (BT), O2 (VMO2), Vodafone and Three UK – in the cities of Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.

RootMetrics typically employs a team of testers to both walk and drive around each city while running a huge battery of tests via a set of regular Samsung Note 10+ 5G Smartphones. The new report is based on data from their H1 2021 testing period. The company has previously published similar reports for Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry and London (here), as well as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Nottingham (here).

The latest report focuses on the four cities of Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle in England. The results come in two different flavours, one is recorded entirely on 5G-only connections, while the other adopts their so-called “Everyday 5G” performance metric – this factors results recorded on both 5G-only and 5G mixed mode connections.

Sadly, there is a catch with these results in that one of the cities (Leicester) does not have any 5G results from Vodafone, which is a trend that we also saw in RootMetrics previous two studies. Vodafone does in fact have a fair bit of 5G coverage in Leicester, although it’s unclear how big this was when RootMetrics conducted their study or whether the study itself simply wasn’t detailed enough to reflect it.

The Results

Overall, EE delivered the highest Everyday 5G and 5G Only availability, as well as the fastest overall median download speeds (this factors in both 4G and 5G), across all four cities. But it was a different story for Everyday 5G and 5G Only download speeds, where O2 came top in all four cities, despite having some of the weakest 5G availability of all the operators.

For example, O2 achieved an Everyday 5G and 5G Only speed (median download) of 153Mbps and 172Mbps in Leicester, respectively. This was not only the fastest result recorded in the study, but also places them comfortably above their rivals, although obviously Vodafone didn’t return a score for that city.

We should point out that all the operators appear to be rapidly improving their 5G availability in such cities. For example, EE’s Everyday 5G availability in Manchester has expanded from 44.7% to 59.4% since 2H 2020, while O2 (VMO2) has gone from 0.3% to 20.0% in the same city, and it was a similar story for O2 – 19.6% to 39.1%. Vodafone has also gone from 0% to 24.4% in Newcastle.

We should point out that Mobile Broadband speeds remain 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. The latest report from RootMetrics also leaves out any mention of 5G latency or upload speeds, although those two areas may be waiting for Standalone 5G (SA) technology to arrive for maximum benefit.

The data is also too new to reflect any impact from the completion of Ofcom’s latest 5G spectrum auction (here), which saw the regulator sell chunks of the 700MHz and 3.6-3.8GHz bands off to various different operators. Given time, these should help to boost their network speeds and coverage.