nPerf Ranks UK 2nd in Europe for Adoption of 5G Standalone Mobile Networks

French benchmarking firm nPerf has today published the results of a new study, which found that the United Kingdom ranks 2nd in Europe for adoption of the latest 5G Standalone (5G+) mobile broadband network technology. The UK was only beaten by Austria, which saw slightly more mobile connection tests take place via 5G+ networks.

The study is based on data gathered from masses of mobile connection tests carried out – between January and July 2026 – by users of the broadband speed testing tools on both nPerf’s website and via their dedicated mobile testing apps for Android and iOS.

The results revealed that some 31.9% of mobile tests conducted in Austria were via 5G+ mobile networks, which slips only slightly to 31.3% in the United Kingdom and then there’s a big fall to 25.1% for third placed country Switzerland. Greece comes bottom of the table on just 8.2%.

“The gaps between the countries in the ranking are significant: Austria leads the UK by 0.6 points, while the latter surpasses Switzerland by 6.2 points. Further down the list, Germany (9.4%) and Belgium (9.0%) bring up the rear, with much lower shares. These differences illustrate an uneven adoption of 5G SA in Europe, but confirm the UK’s strong position among the most advanced countries in this field,” said a spokesperson for nPerf.

The UK is well known to have lagged behind other countries in Europe with its initial 5G deployments and performance (example), which is partly due to issues of spectrum availability from Ofcom, a lack of enough flexibility in the planning system for mast upgrades/new sites and the Government’s earlier decision to ban Huawei’s kit.

However, the government currently retains an ambition “for all populated areas” to have access to 5GSA based mobile broadband by 2030, which mobile operators are trying to support – partly as a way of addressing the performance gap that has been allowed to grow over the past few years. Clearly this is having an impact, although the performance benefits aren’t yet fully showing through in other studies of mobile broadband speed.