Streetwave Examine 4G and 5G Mobile Cover Inside St Mary’s Hospital, London
Network analyst firm Streetwave has today shared the results from a recent survey they conducted inside St Mary’s Hospital in London, which examined the signal coverage and data performance of 4G and 5G mobile (broadband) networks – including EE, Three UK, Vodafone and O2.
Streetwave is understood to have taken their portable data collection equipment around the hospital, focusing on the QEQM Building at 12:33pm on 17th June 2025. Only publicly accessible walkways were surveyed. The results below should thus be considered quite anecdotal, albeit still interesting.
All four of the UK’s mobile operators were measured and their “Acceptable Coverage” scores are listed below. Streetwave typically defines this as reflecting locations where the network provides users with download speeds of at least 5Mbps, uploads of at least 2Mbps and below 40ms latency times (i.e. just about covering most of the common internet use cases / needs).
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In addition, Streetwave also measured the “Essential Coverage” scores, which is said to be reflective of locations where a network can provide users with mobile broadband speeds of above 1Mbps download, 0.5Mbps upload, and below 100ms (milliseconds) of latency (i.e. covering or allowing only the most very basic of use cases / needs).
Overall, O2 (Virgin Media) and EE (BT) jointly delivered the strongest Acceptable Coverage, albeit at just 21%. By comparison, Vodafone returned a slightly lower score at 17% and Three UK only managed 7%. As for Essential Coverage, the results were O2 – 66%, Three UK – 60%, Vodafone – 43% and EE – 42%.
Most hospitals do of course offer a public WiFi network, but some of these can be expensive and don’t always deliver particularly good performance either. Suffice to say that mobile broadband can provide an alternative, but indoor coverage is a much bigger challenge and some hospitals might see that as being competitive with their paid WiFi solutions (i.e. a disincentive to invest in better indoor mobile signals).
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 used to work at this hospital. mobile phone quality and signal strength are horrendous.
Low band networks work best indoors. News at 10.
EE has a big problem.
Of what value is this survey?
– Conducted in a large, steel-framed modern building
– Conducted at a single set of data points (i.e. not multiple samples spaced across the working day)
– Conducted at a site where they perform cancer screening with all the associated radiation emissions.
At the hospital I work at the mobile phone signal is awful. Trying to contact a doctor or consultant on their works mobiles is impossible. The Hospital is like a Faraday cage.
One good thing is the Wi-Fi is free and is very quick.