EE Wins Big in Opensignal Study of Best 4G and 5G UK Mobile Networks

Network benchmarking firm Opensignal has this morning published their first Mobile Network Experience Report for 2026, which measured the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services of all the primary network operators – EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK) – to determine which delivers the best performance. Overall, EE won most, but not all, of the categories.

The study is based off crowdsourced data gathered from users on hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.) between 1st October and 29th December 2025. 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 4G and 5G networks, but it does also examine the speed of 5G-only connections. Overall, EE (BT) once again secured most of the performance categories in the primary study, with the operator doing particularly well to win both the ‘Reliability Experience’ and ‘Consistent Quality’ awards outright, scoring 915 points (on a 100-1000 scale) for Reliability and 78.6% for Quality.

Meanwhile, Three UK delivered the fasted 5G download and upload speeds, as well as the highest ‘time on network’ figure, but otherwise they lagged behind their rivals. Finally, O2 (Virgin Media) scooped one award for ‘Coverage Experience’, while Vodafone failed to win anything.

We’ve summarised some of the key results below.

Download Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections

1. EE 53.2Mbps
2. Three UK 51Mbps
3. Vodafone 37.5Mbps
4. O2 32.8Mbps

Download Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 187Mbps
2. Vodafone 130.9Mbps
3. EE 92.2Mbps
4. O2 89.9Mbps

Upload Speed Experience – All Mobile Connections

1. EE 10.4Mbps
2. Three UK 9.3Mbps
3. Vodafone 7.4Mbps
4. O2 6.4Mbps

Upload Speeds – 5G

1. Three UK 20.2Mbps
2. EE 16Mbps
3. Vodafone 14.1Mbps
4. O2 11Mbps

Time on Network %

(what proportion of time people have a network connection)

1. Three UK 99.4%
2. EE 99%
3. O2 98%
4. Vodafone 97%

UK 5G Availability %

1. EE 77.4%
2. O2 57%
3. Three UK 38.9%
4. Vodafone 29.6%

Mobile speeds remain a difficult thing to study because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor and underground), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment is ever changeable (weather, trees, buildings etc.). All of this can impact signal quality and that’s before we consider any differences in network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum usage between locations.

Suffice to say, performance testing like this may not always tell the whole story, although Opensignal are one of the better organisations at analysing such data. The result also echoes similar studies from other groups, such as Ookla.