Mobile operators in the UK struggle in 5G European Awards 2026
Network benchmarking firm Opensignal, which harnesses crowdsourced testing data from users of their app on millions of devices (Smartphones etc.), has published their annual 5G European Awards 2026 that analysed the mobile network performance of 91 national operators across 27 markets. But sadly mobile providers in the UK didn’t win anything and struggled to even register in the rankings.
The study was based on real-world measurements collected directly from user devices between 1st January to 29th June 2026, which was then evaluated across seven core measures of 5G experience: Time on 5G (new for 2026), 5G Coverage (new for 2026), 5G Reliability, 5G Download Speed, 5G Video, 5G Games, and 5G Voice App.
Opensignal then recognised the top-performing operators in each metric with the Regional Winner, Regional Leader and Rising Star awards. Sadly, UK mobile operators were not named as Regional Winners or Regional Leaders across any of the aforementioned categories, but a couple did get named under the Rising Star awards to highlight operators that have improved the most this year.
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For example, both O2 and Vodafone in the UK were named as Rising Stars for 5G Video performance, while Vodafone also got another one of those for 5G Voice App performance. But while positive, this is perhaps nothing to celebrate. The results sadly won’t come as much of a surprise, with several recent studies highlighting the UK’s poor mobile performance vs Europe (examples here, here and here).
The UK’s poor situation tends to reflect a combination of issues, such as the previous government’s U-turn to ban Huawei, which caused a significant and costly delay to many network deployments. Mobile operators have also faced restrictions when it comes to upgrading existing masts to 5G and deploying new ones, while Ofcom could have been quicker at releasing extra radio spectrum.
On top of all that the past and present governments have historically been generally pretty weak by setting easily achievable population coverage and performance targets. Some of the above challenges have now been overcome and others are in the process of being resolved, but the UK has suffered a fair bit in recent years and it remains unclear whether that will change once 6G starts to arrive toward 2030.
Results of the 5G European Awards 2026
https://insights.opensignal.com/2026/11/5g-european-awards-2026/dt
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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