Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, has recently published their latest Mobile Matters report for 2024. The report, using crowdsourced data from Opensignal collected between October 2023 and March 2024, has been used to benchmark how UK mobile broadband networks are performing. It includes data for Three UK, O2, Vodafone and EE.
You might be a bit surprised by some of the results – The study was full of interesting details and revelations.
Prevalence of 4G Connections Over 5G
Interestingly, over this 6 month period, 78% of cellular network connections were to 4G networks. Just 19.6% of connections were on 5G.
Where a 5G network was available from their mobile network operator, mobile users were able to access data services on that 5G network on 98.4% of occasions. This is compared to 97.2% on 4G and 85% on 3G.
More 5G Mobile Connections in Urban Areas than Rural
Mobile Connections via 5G in urban areas were double that of rural areas (20.9% compared to 10.4% respectively).
Generally, 4G was more prevalent in rural areas than urban.
Rural – 4G (85.6%), 3G (3.8%)
Urban – 4G (76.9%), 3G (2.1%)
You may also be interested to see how this differs across the nations.
And by mobile network operator (MNO).
As you would expect, 5G networks were found to offer faster downstream connectivity than 4G and 3G.
The percentages of an average download speed of 100 Mbit/s (or higher) were
5G: 47%
4G: 11%
3G: 3%
The percentages of an average download speed of under 2Mbit/s were
5G: 1%
4G: 5%
3G: 22%
Which mobile network had the best download speeds over 5G?
The highest share of those higher download speeds on 5G (100Mbit/s and above) went to Three UK with 60%. O2 had the least connections with that download speed over both 5G (32%) and 4G (3%).
Which Mobile Network Has The Fastest Response Time? (Lowest Latency)
For 5G connections, Three UK had the fastest average response time (16.3 milliseconds). In comparison, the fastest average response time over 4G was EE (18.3ms). O2 again lagged behind, with customers revealing the slowest average response time on 5G (21.4ms) and over on 4G it was Vodafone with the slowest response time (23.7ms).
A Wealth of Mobile Data
This report is packed full of interesting data – Far too much for us to be able to share in one article unfortunately! We’d be here all day.
We’d certainly recommend perusing the data tables and reading through the results of what Ofcom and Opensignal have to report from consumers over this latest study’s 6 month period.
You can read the full report here. What stood out most to you?
