The UK’s mobile network operators lag behind their French and German counterparts, finding themselves anchored in the bottom half of a
Data from Netradar showing country rankings on average download speed (bits/s)
European league table which was released today.
Mobile networks in the UK averaged a download speed of 5.0 Mbit/s last year, substantially slower than France (8.4 Mbit/s), Germany (6.1 Mbit/s) and especially Denmark who lead the way in Europe with 22 Mbit/s. The UK came in 23rd in Netradar’s rankings, Germany 19th and France in 8th.
Nordic countries filled four of the top five places, with only Switzerland breaking the hegemony with a benchmark of 16.5 Mbits/s.
There were also considerable differences between the speeds of British operators as 3’s network had the fastest internet connection with an average downlink speed of 6.3 Mbit/s whilst O2 fell behind the likes of T Mobile, Vodafone and Orange with an average of just 3.1 Mbit/s.
Switzerland showed the lowest average latency, at 119ms, with Finland second at 132ms. France (191ms), Germany (277ms) and the UK (307,s) were all lagging in average latencies.
The results are based on measurements collated by Finnish application Netradar, a free mobile app provided by Aalto University which measures the network quality of ordinary mobile phone users. The project leader, Professor Jukka Manner, claimed: ‘Speed depends not only on mobile network operators, but also on used devices, speed limitations in the subscriptions, user’s distance from the operator’s antenna, landscape, available radio technologies and how congested the mobile network is’.
