The communications regulator, Ofcom UK, has today published its first research into the country's national Mobile Broadband speeds and found that the average download speed was just 1.5Mbps (Megabits per second) - rising to 2.1Mbps in areas of "good 3G coverage". By contrast the national average download speed for fixed line broadband ISP connections is 6.2Mbps (here).


The report, which used data from 4.2 million tests conducted by Epitiro, looked specifically at the performance of Mobile Network Operators (MNO) that used USB Modems (Dongles) and Datacards for their mobile internet connectivity. It did not include data from Smartphone's.


Ofcom also revealed that 17% of UK households are making use of Mobile Broadband services and 7% were using it as their only means of internet access (up sharply from 3% in 2009). This could be worrying news for fixed line providers. Overall O2 , Vodafone and Three (3) came out top for speed, while Orange and T-Mobile (Everything Everywhere) were the slowest. O2 also had the lowest latency (lower latency is good for gaming, skype etc.),


Interestingly mobile operators managed to deliver an average upload speed of 0.67Mbps, which compares well with an average of 0.5Mbps for 'up to' 8Mbps fixed line broadband ISPs. Once again Orange was the slowest.


The study also identified that two operators , O2 and T-Mobile , were using image compression methods to reduce bandwidth consumption and speed-up page loading. Vodafone use to do the same but stopped sometime ago. The downside to this is that some web images can appear to be quite distorted.

Meanwhile Ofcom rightly expects Mobile Broadband to improve over the coming years as newer technologies, such as 4G LTE, enter the market with faster speeds, lower latency and better capacity management.

UPDATE 12:53pm

Added a comment from the consumer group, Consumer Focus, below.