The Fastest UK Cities and Regions for 5G Mobile Data Speeds

Mobile benchmarking firm Opensignal has published the results of their latest study, which reveals that the fastest UK city for 5G (mobile broadband) internet download speeds is Birmingham (162.7Mbps), while the West Midlands in England tops the table for fastest UK regions on 151.4Mbps.

The report is based off crowdsourced data gathered from users on hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.) between 1st November 2022 and 29th January 2023. The results were then processed to reveal how the primary mobile network operators compared across various categories.

The study also examined the uplift in mobile broadband speeds, by location, when going from a 4G to 5G network. Overall, users’ 5G download speeds were found to be 3.7 – 5.5 times faster than those seen on 4G, with people in Reading seeing the greatest uplift (5.5 times) and those in London observing the least (3.7 times).

Interestingly, the study also found that there was little difference in the uplift in average download speeds seen by users in rural and urban areas with 5G — with increases of 4.7 times and 4.5 times, respectively — compared to 4G. But urban users still see download speeds on both 5G and 4G that are “significantly faster” than their rural counterparts – by 20.1 Mbps (17.6%) and 5.8 Mbps (23.7%), respectively.

Naturally, urban 5G users spend far more of their time with an active 5G connection (9.6%) than rural users (6.6%), which is hardly surprising given the limited amount of rural 5G network coverage.