Despite Poor Mobile – London Named Most Popular European City for Startups
Network benchmarking firm Opensignal, which uses crowdsourced speedtests from users of its apps and services, has examined the 15 most popular start-up hubs in Europe and warned that the leading city – London – still has a major weakness when it comes to the performance of local mobile connectivity (4G and 5G).
According to DEEP Ecosystems’ Start Up Heatmap Europe 2025 study, London currently ranks top of the table – – putting the United Kingdom’s capital city ahead of rival giants like Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Barcelona, Zurich, Madrid, Vienna and Copenhagen.
However, Opensignal notes that while London is the most popular European city for start-up hubs, people shouldn’t expect a good mobile experience while they’re there. “Londoners have the slowest speeds and the worst experience when using over-the-top voice apps,” said the firm.
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For example, London had one of the lowest rankings for video streaming experience (68.1 out of 100) and it came bottom for voice app experience (77.1 out of 100). On top of that, London also delivered the slowest mobile broadband download speeds of 52.7Mbps and the slowest uploads at 9.8Mbps.
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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“Despite Poor Mobile – London Named Most Popular European City for Startups”
If I say “Despite Tasteless Kebabs – – London Named Most Popular European City for Startups”
I don’t think anyone cares about the speed of mobile internet (assuming it works) when establishing a startup. I am not an entrepreneur, but this sounds bollocks to me. Not the comparison of the data, that is interesting, but the assumption people care this much about it.
AFAIK fibre availability is good at the places where the startup offices would be, that is significantly more important.
Agreed, I don’t really see how mobile performance has any correlation here. Fixed line performance might make more sense but I think it’s still a bit unimportant, as long as you have a good internet connection to do whatever you’re doing with your company then I don’t see why 50mbps isn’t plenty already.
Well, they’ll have fibre and fast wifi at the office, so things like talent pool, regulations, and language are probably more important the bad mobile networks we have.
That may be true up to a point, but the very poor performance of other UK cities in this ranking is quite obvious. There’s only three UK cities in the top 50, and the others are Liverpool (39) and Bristol (41). Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Leicester, Edinburgh don’t make this list at all. In relative terms Germany, Holland and the Nordics are doing much better than the UK across this table.
And as I read this on Park Lane in Mayfair, during the rush hour, my 5G Vodafone signal is 175 Mbps download and 53 Mbps upload. So believe what you will.
This seems like a forced comparison. London has great fibre connectivity which is what startups are likely to prioritise for their offices. Mobile connectivity is important and is an area where London has an opportunity to improve on, but this isn’t the main criteria for starting up someplace.
As someone who runs a health tech company in the UK I have to say, we are off to Europe. Phone service is fine, its this crappy anti business Govenment thats done it for me.