StreetWave Name EE UK Fastest for Mobile Broadband in London
Mobile network analyst firm Streetwave has today published the results of a new real-world benchmark, which examined the mobile operator performance of EE (BT), O2 (Virgin Media), Vodafone and Three UK across the country’s capital city of London. Suffice to say that EE came out top for mobile broadband speeds and network coverage.
Streetwave typically adopts a more scientific approach with their studies (i.e. they don’t use crowdsourcing), which collects data on an address-by-address basis and is designed to represent real-world consumer experience. The study is also network generation agnostic, meaning they don’t prioritise any connection technology type (2G to 5G) and allow each operator to manage them in the same way a consumer would be managed by the network.
The latest research took place between the 2nd October 2023 and the 18th January 2024. Measurements from all network generations (2G to 5G) were recorded using the company’s “proprietary analysis tools“, which collected a total of 2.7 million data samples.
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The results have been summarised below, but suffice to say that EE managed to come top of every table. However, it would have been nice to see a greater split between 4G and 5G results, as well as details on other aspects of connectivity, such as latency and 5G availability (i.e. time spent on 5G).
Real World Data Coverage
1. EE 79%
2. Vodafone 72%
3. O2 68%
4. Three UK 61%
Real World Download Speeds
1. EE 22.1Mbps
2. Three UK 21.2Mbps
3. Vodafone 19.6Mbps
4. O2 19Mbps
Real World Upload Speeds
1. EE 5.7Mbps
2. Vodafone 4.8Mbps
3. O2 4.6Mbps
4. Three UK 4.1Mbps
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I mean, those are good numbers, considering the amount of interference London gets from all the massive buildings
The coverage numbers are also supplemented with operators federated WiFi networks inside buildings, where users automatically connect via their MNO SIM identity.
Everywhere from supermarkets, museums, and of course the underground.
In terms of speeds, they are affected by capacity in the capital.
Huge amounts of users inside each cell site competing for bandwidth: but at the end of the day most people don’t need crazy high speeds on their mobile device for the applications they are using it for. Far more important to have ubiquitous and dense coverage and capacity.