UK Struggles in 2024 Country Ranking of Mobile Broadband Speeds

Crowdsourced benchmarking firm Opensignal, which collects data from consumer speedtests, has today published a new summary of mobile broadband (4G and 5G) speeds across Europe – based on data from Q4 2023. But if you want to find the UK, you’ll need to look toward the bottom of the tables.

In terms of the UK, the data reveals that our average (median) mobile download speeds (3G, 4G and 5G etc.) have increased from 29.8Mbps a year ago to 33Mbps today (+3.2Mbps). But this is actually one of the smallest increases across the continent. For example, Denmark’s speeds increased by +25.5Mbps in the year to reach 98.8Mbps.

The situation when looking at 5G specific speeds is similarly dire for the UK, placing us toward the bottom of the table, again. The UK delivered average 5G download speeds of 118.1Mbps, which actually doesn’t sound that bad, until you realise that it’s well below the vast majority of European countries. Front-runners Denmark and Bulgaria are, by comparison, delivering 301.8Mbps and 288.9Mbps, respectively.

On the subject of 5G network availability (i.e. the proportion of time 5G enabled users had an active 5G connection), the UK returned another poor showing on just 8.4%, which yet again places us near the very bottom of the table. By comparison, Bulgaria reached 24% and Finland hit 22.8%.

Country-to-country comparisons are notoriously difficult things to get right, but the above results are particularly poor for a country that was once one of the front-runners in the world for early 5G deployments and performance (mostly between 2019 – 2020). Network operators often point to the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and supply shortages, but those hit other countries too.

The reality is that the UK’s current situation is probably a combination of issues, such as the Government’s sudden U-turn to ban Huawei – this hit about a year after some operators (e.g. EE) had already started deploying 5G. Mobile operators previously warned that the decision, which also impacted existing 4G kit due to the close interdependency of such networks, could delay the completion of the 5G rollout by 2-3 years and add costs of up to £2bn across all operators (the hit to BT alone was c. £500m).

In addition, Ofcom hasn’t released as much 5G friendly spectrum as other countries, and in fact they’ve yet to release any of the higher frequently mmW bands (although 26GHz and 40GHz are due to be auctioned off soon) – these are very good at pushing multi-gigabit mobile broadband speeds in dense / busy areas.

On top of that, the UK Government has, until recently, been fairly lacklustre when it comes to setting ambitious targets for 5G. Back in 2017 they talked about getting “the majority of the population covered by a 5G signal by 2027,” which was a very low bar and commercial operators were always bound to reach 50%+ coverage well before 2027 (most hit this between 2022 and 2023). More recently, they’ve upped their game a bit and pledged for “all populated areas to be covered by ‘standalone’ 5G (5G-plus) by 2030” (here), but a solid target for geographic coverage is also needed.

The Government have similarly taken far too long to support the roll-out of 5G by cutting red tape on infrastructure build, which is at the time of writing is still going through Ofcom’s final consultation phase (here). In an ideal world, these measures would have been legislated for before the 5G deployment began in 2019. We can only hope that there’s a bit more ambition when it comes to the future deployment of 6G.

Finally, it’s worth remarking that recent mergers and proposed mergers between major network operators, such as Vodafone and Three UK, can sometimes cause delays to deployments because of the need to rationalise network coverage (e.g. remove unnecessary duplication) and re-plan future work.