- London ranks 10th in Europe for the quality of its 5G experience, according to a new report from fixed and mobile network benchmarking company MedUX.
- The city lags behind other European cities for a variety of reasons, including Huawei’s forced withdrawal from the UK’s 5G rollout.
- According to MedUX, Berlin ranks first in Europe for 5G quality, a result attributed to the city’s strong infrastructure.
According to a report shared with CNBC, London lags far behind other major European cities when it comes to the quality of 5G connectivity.
London ranks 10th for the quality of the 5G experience in Europe, out of a group of 10 cities that includes Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and Lisbon, according to research from fixed and mobile network benchmarking firm MedUX.
The German capital has the best overall 5G experience, which MedUX attributes to Berlin’s superiority in areas such as network consistency across different levels of applications and overall low latency. Masu.
“They’re very good at doing things the right way,” Rafael Galarreta, MedUX’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview with CNBC.
“It’s the best in certain worlds,” he added, highlighting the city’s strong capabilities in video streaming and data for over-the-top media platforms.
MedUX uses robots to assess the quality of fixed and mobile wireless internet broadband and identify and resolve network issues. The company works with communications providers, regulators, and enterprises to benchmark and monitor networks.
According to MedUX, Berlin has the best 5G coverage of all European cities, with a reach rate of 89.6%. It’s also the best city overall for 5G streaming, with average latency of less than 40ms.
Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris received the highest scores among European cities in MedUX’s comprehensive 5G quality benchmark. Lisbon, Milan and Porto were runners-up.
Meanwhile, London was near the bottom of the European 5G network rankings. According to MedUX, nearly 77.5% of the city’s population currently has 5G on their devices, which is below the city average.
Downlink speeds in London are also poor, with users in the city averaging 143 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds, compared to 528 Mbps in Lisbon, 446 Mbps in Porto and 326 Mbps in Barcelona, according to MedUX data.
Munich, Germany, the second worst city for 5G downlink speeds, had an average download speed of 259 Mbps.
“The UK is struggling for a number of reasons,” Galaretta said. “We’ve already talked about the macro things, but the two most important aspects of UK mobile where networks lag behind are speed and accessibility, and network responsiveness.”
According to Galaretta, network responsiveness impacts latency and impacts data-intensive applications such as online gaming, especially cloud gaming, which continuously delivers games to end users through remote data centers.
Who is responsible for the ban on Huawei?
The figures shared by MedUX clearly show how UK operators lag behind their European counterparts in 5G quality.
According to data shared by MedUX with CNBC, EE ranks 12th out of the top 36 carriers in the European market for the quality of the 5G network experience. Vodafone is ranked 24th and Three is ranked 33rd. O2 came in 36th place. Those companies and EE owner BT were contacted by CNBC on Tuesday but did not immediately provide comment.
Galarreta highlighted the UK’s decision to ban Huawei from 5G networks as a possible reason behind the decline in 5G network quality.
The UK began rolling out 5G networks in 2019, as British carriers EE and Vodafone became the first in the country to launch ultra-fast data plans.
Huawei has faced an uphill battle since the British government announced in the summer of 2020 that the company would have to completely ban 5G equipment from its networks by 2027. British carriers, which have strongly criticized the decision due to the disruption to the rollout, are dumping on competition. Huawei core network and non-core network equipment.
“This delay in deployment likely impacted overall coverage, availability, and user experience, especially given that the Huawei ban came after the initial deployment had already begun.” Galaretta said.
Galarreta noted that quantifying the impact of the UK’s Huawei ban is a difficult task, as MedUX’s research primarily focuses on measuring service quality and experience for end customers.
Galarreta said another factor is the impact of industry mergers and acquisitions, and the resulting regulatory pushback, which has led to disruptions for certain facilities.
MedUX tests 5G quality in a variety of environments, including wireless technology samples and multi-threaded download speed tests based on public content delivery networks.
It also takes into account the quality of use of various online services such as X, Facebook, YouTube streaming, access to specific URLs, requests to game servers, and the ease of navigation of websites accessed through the Google Chrome browser. Masu.
Huawei competes with network infrastructure giants such as Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia.
Despite Huawei being banned from entering the UK, the Chinese telecoms vendor reportedly still has a large presence in the country’s 5G networks. According to a report by Strand Consulting, equipment from Chinese vendors, with Huawei being the only one active in the UK, still accounts for around 41% of the UK’s 5G network.
