Opensignal Name the UK Top 4G and 5G Mobile Operators for H2 2024

Crowdsourced benchmarking firm Opensignal has today published their latest Mobile Network Experience Report for H2 2024, which examines the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services of all four primary networks – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to find which delivers the best performance. Overall, EE scooped 10 out of 14 awards.

As usual, the report is based off data (speed and signal tests etc.) gathered from people using hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.) between 1st June and 29th August 2024. The results were then processed to reveal how the primary mobile network operators compared across various categories.

The study continues to be predominantly focused upon the combined performance of 3G, 4G and 5G networks, but it also splits out some of the results for 5G-only connections. Overall, EE continued to pick up the win for most of the performance categories in the primary study, while Three UK came top for 5G download speed, 5G upload speed and general network availability (i.e. % of time users spent connected to a network), albeit not 5G availability where EE now tops the table.

Elsewhere, O2 only managed to pick up one win for ‘Coverage Experience’, while Vodafone failed to score any wins across any categories – despite still performing reasonably well in several areas.

Download Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections
(H2 2023 Result in Brackets)

1. EE 45.9Mbps (40Mbps)
2. Three UK 38Mbps (34.5Mbps)
3. Vodafone 31.1Mbps (27.9Mbps)
4. O2 23.1Mbps (20.9Mbps)

Upload Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections

1. EE 9.8Mbps (9.3Mbps)
2. Vodafone 7.8Mbps (8Mbps)
3. Three UK 7.1Mbps (6.3Mbps)
4. O2 5.3Mbps (5Mbps)

Download Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 208.9Mbps (205.5Mbps)
2. Vodafone 138.7Mbps (114.3Mbps)
3. EE 96.8Mbps (99.5Mbps)
4. O2 80.1Mbps (77Mbps)

Upload Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 19.2Mbps (17.5Mbps)
2. EE 17.7Mbps (15.9Mbps)
3. Vodafone 15.1Mbps (14.9Mbps)
4. O2 10.1Mbps (10Mbps)

UK Availability % – All Mobile Connections

1. Three UK 99.2% (99.1%)
2. EE 98.5% (98.5%)
3. O2 97.4% (97.3%)
4. Vodafone 95.4% (97.5%)

UK Availability % – 5G

1. EE 13.2% (10.6%)
2. Vodafone 9.6% (10%)
3. Three UK 9.3% (10.3%)
4. O2 8.3% (10.1%)

Overall, most of the mobile operators seemed to record a performance improvement over this time last year, albeit with smaller changes now that the first generation 5G deployments have reached some level of maturity. But sadly, O2 continued to generally trend toward the bottom of the pack across most of the key performance metrics.

However, the 5G availability (% of time spent on 5G) performance of Vodafone, Three UK and O2 all seemed to suffer a fall over this time last year, with O2’s drop from 10.1% to 8.3% being particularly pronounced. We aren’t quite sure why this has occurred, although 5G availability is one of those areas that can be affected by external factors that impact signal strength (e.g. the weather) and other changes (i.e. it doesn’t mean that 5G coverage shrank). The 3G switch off and wider changes in 4G signal strength, such as via the ‘Share Rural Network’ programme, may have also impacted this area.

Naturally, 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.