Internet connectivity testing company Ookla, which collects data through its popular Speedtest.net service, recently published its latest 2023 Q3-4 (H2) study on the performance of 5G-based mobile broadband networks in the UK. Three UK has revealed that it is continually improving its performance. Achieve the fastest speed. However, the performance has decreased.
Relevant users constantly move around different areas (indoors, outdoors, underground, etc.), use different devices with different capabilities, and their surrounding environment (weather, trees, buildings, etc.) changes, so mobile data performance remains difficult to determine. Changeable.
All of the above can impact service, and that’s before considering other issues such as network (backhaul) capacity at different cell sites and differences in spectrum ownership between mobile carriers. Despite this, Ookla’s latest research found 1,076,761 user-initiated incidents conducted via the Speedtest iOS and Android mobile apps (using 339,093 devices) from all major UK mobile operators. We try to find out all this by comparing the 5G tests of .
As a result, Three UK continued to offer the fastest 5G mobile download speeds (median) of 226.27Mbps, although this was significantly down from 265.75Mbps in H1 2023 and 292.57Mbps in H2 2022. By comparison, other carriers have seen little change. The UK trio also came out on top for upload speed (13.14Mbps), while EE returned the highest latency score of 30ms (milliseconds).
Ookla UK 5G mobile speeds in H2 2023 (compared to H1 2023)
Median download speed
3 UK companies – 226.27Mbps (265.75Mbps)
Vodafone – 141.71Mbps (140.27Mbps)
EE – 94.79Mbps (99.06Mbps)
O2 – 70.43Mbps (70.88Mbps)
Median upload speed
3 UK companies – 13.14Mbps (13.03Mbps)
Vodafone – 12.21Mbps (13.72Mbps)
EE – 12.06Mbps (12.88Mbps)
O2 – 8.93Mbps (8.98Mbps)
Median latency (The smaller the number, the faster)
EE – 30ms (31ms)
Vodafone – 31ms (30ms)
3 UK – 31ms (34ms)
O2 – 33ms (32ms)
Apart from Three UK’s significant drop in 5G download speeds, most of the other network operators have remained more or less flat, and sadly this has changed little for O2 (Virgin Media), who remain at the bottom of the performance table. does not mean Ookla also includes city-specific results for his 5G speeds in London, Birmingham, and Manchester, as shown below.
