Which mobile network offers the best 4G services?

Last November, an intriguing experiment took place across the UK.

Four cars travelled over 6,500 miles along A-roads, B-roads and motorways, visiting a total of 50 towns and cities from Belfast to Bristol.

Each car contained four Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphones, connected to the UK’s four main mobile networks.

Periodically, researchers would hop out of the cars and walk around pedestrianised areas, carrying all four phones.

They’d even take occasional train rides, if the rail company in that particular area could muster up any services.

You might have passed these researchers by without realising their mission – to identify which of the UK’s four big mobile networks offers the best 4G and 3G connectivity.

Dotting the u’s

This authoritative investigation into the best 4G mobile network was conducted by a German company called umlaut – the artists formerly known as P3.

Every autumn, umlaut/P3 conducts extensive field testing of the UK’s phone networks, determining which companies offer the fastest and most dependable services.

To reach definitive conclusions, they conducted 50 tests at each location.

These ranged from webpage download success ratios and the time taken to upload a 2.5MB file through to voice and data coverage across both 3G and 4G networks.

To ensure field research wasn’t skewed by random events like a transmitter outage, this annual survey is bolstered by crowdsourced data using 800 Android apps.

In total, umlaut’s roving reporters acquired 225,000 data samples and almost 30,000 voice samples.

Meanwhile, their crowdsourced data encompassed 5.3 billion test samples from 316,000 volunteers.

That makes this one of the most comprehensive investigations into the best 4G mobile network coverage the UK has ever seen.

But which networks came out on top? And who could have done better?

EEs are good

It’s perhaps not a surprise that EE achieved the highest overall score in many of the 50 test categories.

After all, EE’s network is an amalgam of the old Orange and T-Mobile networks – two for the price of one. And their 2017 acquisition by BT has further broadened their reach.

EE came top in key categories like national voice coverage, with a score of 99.7 per cent. They had easily the highest percentage of 4G coverage, and far faster non-urban data speeds.

In urban areas, their average data download speed of 78.4Mbit/s was almost a third faster than any rival, with a similarly superior upload speed of 20.9Mbit/s.

Hot on EE’s heels came Vodafone, with a considerably improved performance from 2018 and an overall score of 839 compared to EE’s 876.

Vodafone’s scores were fractionally behind EE’s in almost every category, but there was little to separate them in terms of average video resolution or file download success percentages.

The gap between these two brands and the other two big mobile networks was striking.

With overall scores of 697 and 621 respectively, O2 and Three clearly have a great deal of work to do.

Neither network performed dreadfully in umlaut’s tests. Yet neither could match EE and Vodafone’s speeds, or deliver comparable success rates for file uploads and downloads.

Three recorded some worrying scores for successfully displaying YouTube videos (79.9 per cent, versus scores of over 90 per cent among the other networks).

It also lagged way behind in terms of successfully downloading webpages and 5MB files, with one in ten attempts at the latter failing.

Three had by far the highest number of degraded periods of operation between June and November – 14 in total, compared to Vodafone’s two and none for EE or O2.

Even so, umlaut’s CEO did acknowledge Three offered good voice services, particularly in urban areas.

It’s also worth noting these tests didn’t factor in 5G services, which were being rolled out throughout the survey.

It may be that 2020’s report shows a change in the standings, with one network’s 5G coverage and download speeds giving it a new advantage over its rivals.

But for now, consumers wanting to sign up to the best 4G mobile network should look in the direction of either EE or Vodafone.