Three UK Delivered Fastest Mobile Broadband Speeds at Glastonbury
Network testing firm Ookla (i.e. Speedtest.net, Downdetector.co.uk) has today revealed that mobile operator Three UK delivered the fastest 4G and 5G mobile broadband speeds during last weekend’s Glastonbury Festival, which saw the operator produce a median average download of 347.66Mbps. But O2 (Virgin Media) were the slowest on 67.66Mbps.
The median mobile download speeds on Three UK were found to be “at least twice as fast” as those on any other operator, and the network also topped Ookla’s Quality of Experience (QoE) measures – reflecting the typical performance for web browsing, video calling, and gaming throughout the event.
However, despite Three UK delivering the fastest speeds, the study noted that festival-goers were still “least likely to experience poor performance” on EE’s network throughout Worthy Farm. At the 10th percentile, which captures the slowest 10% of outcomes when signal was weakest or congestion highest, EE still recorded the fastest download and upload speeds of any operator.
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One critical thing to point out here is that all network operators will be working to deliver event specific coverage and capacity for major festivals like this. Ookla has thus included data to show the difference between festival vs pre-festival performance, which shows quite a diverse set of results.
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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Shows what they can achieve in a busy place if they want to !
yeah, by bringing mobile masts. Which clearly show that their networks are under invested and neglected.
There’s a lot of people who pay for expensive contracts they don’t fully utilise. Yet the money isn’t invested.
Not sure it’s under-investment or neglect to not have enough capacity for 200,000+ people serving a few hundred acres of farm land that’s essentially empty 51 weeks a year there permanently.
As above comments already cover, they are capable of things, just rollout enough….
Something I wondered recently is why some masts can become to overwhelmed in areas just because of usage not coverage, so why not add more sectors to existing mast sites, why are they sticking with 3 sectors.
we are just reliant on economy grade service, no investment is being carefully made where it pays.
A bit poor for Vodafone who are a headline festival sponsor! Obviously they have just merged with Three, but really they should have the best connectivity on their own.
I went to the festival last year on a local Sunday ticket. Got in late morning, speeds were amazing, then people started to wake up and get on their phones and it was terrible everywhere we went from early afternoon onwards.
This was on Vodafone who I think was the “official” network of the festival last year. No one could even load a webpage on any network and we were all trying due to an England euros match being on the same day with people desperate for updates.
So this report paints a lot better picture than my experience and I’ve been to the festival over 20 times.
I am extremely surprised that Three coped at all…. they can barely deploy DAS systems or CoWs as it is.
I have both a three and EE sim in my phone. I found three to be fine in the campsites and main stages but had to switch to EE sim alot when in other main festival areas.
Felt a lot like where one provider had good coverage the other had none!
Interesting seeing as 3 had a national outage for a lot of the first day of Glastonbury so a lot of people had no signal. A friend ended up buying a Voxi eSim (Vodafone) because their Smarty (3) reception for mobile data was still intermittent on Thursday.