NET CHECK Mobile Testing Names Vodafone UK Best for London

A new benchmark of mobile network performance (voice and broadband) across the Greater London area, which was conducted by the little known NET CHECK organisation, has revealed that Vodafone UK beat rivals at EE (BT), Three UK and O2 (Virgin Media) to be named as the best performing operator.

The NET CHECK study, which involved a mix of driving and walk tests that were performed separately by different teams between 20th April and 2nd May 2023, was carried out across all 32 London boroughs and the City of London area. The measurement technicians drove 20 routes and covered a distance of 894km, while walk testers carried out tests at 13 different locations, travelling for 1-3 hours around each area (covering 120km).

For data services, a total of around 30,000 data samples per operator were collected. For voice services, around 2,400 test calls were made, and 10 speech samples were collected in each test call, resulting in a total of around 24,000 speech samples.

In terms of data services, Vodafone scored 561.12 points out of 650 possible ranking points, which was followed by EE with 552.05, O2 on 443.95 and Three UK with just 402.03 points. By comparison, for voice services, Vodafone scored 323.8 points out of 350 possible ranking points, followed by O2 with 321.98, EE on 319.29 points and Three UK comes in fourth place with a gap of around 10 points.

The catch is that this study was only conducted across London and, as we know from other studies (e.g. Rootmetrics), major UK urban areas can all experience big differences in network coverage and performance between operators. Otherwise, we’ve published the detail data test results below for more context, although sadly there’s no split between 4G and 5G capabilities.