In terms of 5G experience quality, London lags behind the rest of Europe

Paresh Jadhav

10 months ago

New research by network testing and monitoring specialist MedUX paints three of the four major UK mobile operators as falling short when it comes to providing an enjoyable 5G experience in London and other cities and regions.

Findings have revealed that London lags far behind European counterparts in terms of 5G speed, accessibility and responsiveness. EE ranks dead last while Vodafone and Three both fall far behind their European competitors.

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5G Coverage

Mobile network providers are expanding 5G coverage using low-band frequencies that require fewer cell sites and tower masts to cover larger areas, thus offering coverage to more people but at slower speeds. According to UK’s leading MVNO UCtel: Low-band is like the child of the spectrum in that it travels long distances but doesn’t possess as much power.”

According to Opensignal’s latest data on network performance testing specialist’s findings, London’s average download speeds only improve by 3.7 times after switching to 5G; this compares to Reading which saw improvements of 5.5x, Barcelona and Paris which saw similar gains of 5.6 times improvement when making this transition.

MedUX released another report that confirms London’s low network quality rating, showing British carriers to lag behind European counterparts when it comes to 5G experience. Of all 37 carriers operating across Europe, British carriers EE and O2 placed poorly when it came to speed, accessibility and responsiveness – ranking 12th and 36th respectively out of 37 carriers respectively.

Speed

Londoners enjoy superior streaming and social media performance from EE’s network, even surpassing Vodafone and Three’s in London. But that only tells half the tale; according to a new quality of experience study, all four major UK mobile networks present less-than-flattering images.

The UK tends to trail European peers when it comes to speed, accessibility and network responsiveness, all factors which impact latency — important considerations when using data-intensive applications such as online gaming. This may be partly attributed to British regulators not yet making available 5G mmWave frequencies which would enable faster speeds with wider coverage.

RootMetrics reports that the UK is showing some signs of improvement when it comes to 5G connectivity; specifically, in London’s first half of 2019 over half of EE tests had next-gen connectivity present compared with 28.8% in H1 2020; an encouraging figure but unfortunately still not enough to keep us out of last place when it comes to this technology.

Responsiveness

Londoners are suffering due to slow speeds on mobile networks, which limit their ability to surf the web and play games on smartphones. London ranked last in a European 5G quality benchmark from MedUX – an expert firm for network benchmarking – thus underscoring the necessity of investing further in network densification and mmWave spectrum expansion.

Contrastingly, cities such as Berlin, Barcelona and Paris perform better in MedUX’s benchmark. MedUX cites these cities’ superior performance in areas such as network consistency across applications and low latency.

The report paints three of the UK’s four mobile operators in an unfavorable light. EE, Three and Vodafone all earned low rankings when it came to providing Londoners with a robust 5G experience; especially poor ratings were given for network availability/accessibility and DNS service performance as well as web browsing performance by this firm.

Availability

UK mobile operators still face considerable challenges in offering customers an optimal 5G experience, according to network benchmarking firm MedUX’s recent report on 5G quality in European cities – London came last in this analysis while Berlin took first place for its high network consistency and low latency rates.

Though Lisbon and Porto boast more impressive 4G coverage, their 5G networks far exceed that of Washington D.C. by an order of magnitude. According to MedUX data, Washington’s mobile networks only deliver average downlink speeds of 143 Mbps – considerably below urban norms and far behind Lisbon’s 528 and Porto’s 446 speeds respectively.

The major UK mobile operators appear to be struggling to roll out 5G networks successfully, as evidenced by results of the most recent MedUX report. Of particular note are results for EE, Vodafone and Virgin Media O2, particularly before its merger with Virgin Media’s fixed-line network.