Opensignal Name UK Best 4G and 5G Mobile Networks for H2 2023

Opensignal has published their latest biannual Mobile Network Experience Report for H2 2023, which benchmarks the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services from all four primary UK mobile operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to find which ones deliver the best performance. Overall, EE and Three UK seem to fair the best.

As usual, the latest report continues to be based off crowdsourced data gathered from users on hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.), this time between 1st June 2023 and 29th August 2023. The results were then processed to reveal how the primary mobile network operators (MNO) compared across various categories.

The study is predominantly focused upon the combined performance of 3G, 4G and 5G networks, but it also splits out some of the results for 5G connections. Overall, EE harvested the most awards, scooping seven wins outright and securing three joint awards, which is slightly down from the last report when it won eight outright but shared first place across five categories.

In second place is Three UK, which holds to its recent tradition of winning awards for its 5G speed (downloads and uploads) and availability, which is often reflected in other studies too. The operator was also the joint winner for 5G Video Experience and 5G Live Video Experience. We’ve summarised all the key results below.

Download Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections
(H1 2023 Result in Brackets)

1. EE 40Mbps (47.7Mbps)
2. Three UK 34.5Mbps (35.4Mbps)
3. Vodafone 27.9Mbps (25.9Mbps)
4. O2 20.9Mbps (19.3Mbps)

Download Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 205.5Mbps (237.7Mbps)
2. Vodafone 114.3Mbps (100.6Mbps)
3. EE 99.5Mbps (122.3Mbps)
4. O2 77Mbps (75Mbps)

Upload Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections

1. EE 9.3Mbps (9.8Mbps)
2. Vodafone 8Mbps (8.2Mbps)
3. Three UK 6.3Mbps (6.2Mbps)
4. O2 5Mbps (5.1Mbps)

Upload Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 17.5Mbps (17.3Mbps)
2. EE 15.9Mbps (16.9Mbps)
3. Vodafone 14.9Mbps (14.9Mbps)
4. O2 10Mbps (9.8Mbps)

UK Availability % – All Mobile Connections

1. Three UK 99.1% (99%)
2. EE 98.5% (98.3%)
3. Vodafone 97.5% (97.3%)
4. O2 97.3% (97%)

UK Availability % – 5G

1. EE 10.6% (9.8%)
2. Three UK 10.3% (10.6%)
3. O2 10.1% (8%)
4. Vodafone 10% (9.7%)

The results highlight a few interesting changes from the last update, with both front-runners EE and Three UK appearing to lose some of their lead in download speed. In the case of EE, this meant dropping from 2nd to 3rd place for 5G download performance, while improvements at Vodafone helped them to edge forward.

The 5G availability (% of time spent on 5G) performance of all networks also improved to be almost neck-and-neck, which saw O2 (VMO2) delivering the biggest overall increase. But sadly, O2 remains the lowest rated mobile operator across most categories, which has been a fairly common trend over the past few years – the merger with Virgin Media is yet to show much of a positive impact in this respect.

However, there are caveats to this sort of study, such as the fact that app-based crowdsourced data can be impacted by any limitations or locations of the devices or plans being used, which at the same time removes the ability to adopt a common type of hardware and environment to help form a solid baseline. Naturally, some operators also have better 4G or 5G coverage, lots of spectrum bands and more advanced networks than others too.

Suffice to say that performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story, although Opensignal are generally one of the better organisations at analysing such data.