EE come top in Streetwave study of Cornwall UK’s mobile broadband performance

Network analyst firm Streetwave has published the results from their recent survey of mobile network coverage and data (4G, 5G) performance across Cornwall in England, which tracked the capabilities of EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK) across more than 5,000km of the county’s roads between 27th July and 7th October 2026.

Streetwave typically works by harnessing council waste collection vehicles to map mobile network coverage and data speeds across various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, bin trucks are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using special software, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go around their routes.

The data they collect is often then used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage and or network capacity, while also giving locals access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/). Cornwall has been live on that service for the past week or so.

In terms of the overall results, Streetwave typically uses two measures – ‘Basic Performance‘ and ‘Good Performance‘. Basic Performance reflects locations where the mobile network provides users with broadband speeds of above 1Mbps download, 0.5Mbps upload, and less than 200ms (milliseconds) of latency / RTT (i.e. supporting only the most basic of use cases or needs).

As for Good Performance, this is defined as the percentage of locations surveyed where a user receives at least 5Mbps download, 1.5Mbps upload speeds and less than 100ms latency (RTT) – allowing most use cases like HD video streaming or conference calls to be run. Granted this is still pretty slow, but for most Smartphone use cases it’s just about enough.

Cornwall’s Basic Performance results by mobile operator
➤ EE 77%
➤ Vodafone 65%
➤ Three UK 45%
➤ O2 39%

Cornwall’s Good Performance results by mobile operator

➤ EE 61%
➤ Vodafone 43%
➤ Three UK 23%
➤ O2 19%

The results are clearly positive news for mobile operator EE (BT), which in a rural county like Cornwall seems to have delivered the best overall performance and often by quite a sizeable margin. Admittedly the scores here are still a bit “glass half full or half empty“, especially given how the 61% rating for Good Performance still means that 39% fell outside of that – a fairly significant proportion.

On the other hand, the situation for the other mobile providers ranged from passable to downright abysmal. Both Three UK and O2 were particularly awful and failed to get above the 50% mark in either grade. Clearly there’s a lot of work for some of the operators still to do in this county.