Opensignal has published their biannual September 2022 Mobile Network Experience Report, which measures the 4G and 5G (mobile broadband) services of all four primary network operators – EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three UK – to determine which delivers the best performance. Both EE and Three UK picked up most of the wins.
As usual, this report is based off crowdsourced data gathered from users on hundreds of thousands of devices (Smartphones etc.) between 1st June and 29th August 2022. The results were then processed to reveal how the primary mobile network operators compared across various categories.
The study continues to be predominantly focused upon the combined performance of 4G and 5G networks, but it does also examine the speed of 5G-only connections. Overall, EE once again won most of the performance categories in the primary study, but Three UK is continuing to threaten the status quo.
Indeed, Three UK does extreme well on the 5G front – scoring an impressive 228.4Mbps for average download speed (up from 204.3Mbps six months ago) and availability of 9.1% (up from 8.7%) – this reflects the % of time that a user spends connected to 5G vs 4G. All of this shows how quickly they’re catching up and harnessing their large blocks of spectrum; after being late to start the rollout.
However, while Three UK may dominate for 5G downloads and availability, the difference is not as clear-cut for other categories like upload speed. The reason for this is that most 5G networks today are still hobbled by existing 4G infrastructure, but that may change once pure end-to-end (standalone) 5G networks start to expand. Otherwise, the key results are summarised below, both for combined networks and those just for 5G.