O2 5G coverage checker

Last updated 29th January, 2026

O2 5G is available in thousands of UK cities and towns at the time of writing, up from an initial launch in six places on October 17th, 2019.

Coverage in places with O2 5G won’t always be comprehensive, but that’s in line with rivals and the situation is improving over time, with many places now having widespread 5G availability.

Below we’ve included a full overview of O2’s 5G network, along with a list of all the major locations that O2 5G is available in, and a comparison to the coverage of other UK networks.

O2 5G Summary

O2 5G is now quite widely available, but you still won’t find it everywhere, so to check whether it’s available where you need it, enter your postcode into our coverage checker at the top of this page.

That will then show you how good a 5G experience you can expect, as well as O2’s 4G and voice performance in the area, and you’ll even see how other networks compare.

Our coverage checker uses both official network data and information from third-party sources, so it’s comprehensive, and this is real-time data, so you’ll be getting a totally up-to-date picture of O2’s coverage.

How does O2's 5G coverage compare to others?

We track 120 major towns and cities in the UK for 5G coverage, and the networks stack up as follows:

You can see exactly what those 120 places are in the chart below. It’s worth noting that a tick on this chart just means a network has some 5G coverage in a location – not that 5G will be available town or city-wide. So it’s always worth using a network’s official coverage checker or our coverage checker to get a more detailed picture of 5G coverage in your area.

On top of that, indoor and outdoor coverage can differ. Even official coverage checkers won’t always be able to paint an accurate picture of indoor coverage, but they can give you some idea. In all cases though, 5G coverage should improve over time, so if you don’t have 5G where you are now, or if it doesn’t reach inside your home or office, it might arrive before too long.

The most recent places that O2 has brought 5G to (as of January 2026) include parts of the Outer Hebrides, along with Preston and Walsall.

4G coverage

If you’re not in a 5G coverage area then you’ll typically get 4G speeds, just like you would have before 5G. 

O2 has around 99% UK population coverage with 4G, which is comparable with rivals. Check out the chart below for a 4G coverage comparison between O2 and the other main UK networks, based on the latest available data.

How fast is O2's 5G network?

The most recent data we have for O2 includes RootMetrics results from the first half of 2025, in which O2 achieved a disappointing 98.7Mbps median 5G download speed, putting it below rivals.

The same report found that its 95th percentile speed (so close to the highest) was 323.2Mbps, and its 5th percentile one (so close to the lowest) was 5.1Mbps. These again are lower than rivals.

Similarly to this RootMetrics report, an Opensignal report from September 2024 found that O2’s average 5G download speed was just 80.1Mbps, which is lower than EE, Vodafone or Three.

And there’s also an Ookla report from the second half of 2025, which found that O2’s median 5G download speed was 78.92Mbps and its 90th percentile 5G download speed was 268.42Mbps.

Of course, as O2’s coverage improves, its performance may well continue to do so too, but how much by remains to be seen.

Even now though, O2’s 5G speeds should be far higher than its 4G ones, as for example O2’s 4G download speeds average just 18.2Mbps according to an October 2020 report from Opensignal. We’re using this old report because newer reports don’t tend to provide 4G speeds.

Latency

Latency - measured in milliseconds (ms) - is how long a mobile network takes to respond to a request before it even starts properly transferring data. On 4G networks latency is often around 30-50ms, but on 5G it could get as low as 1ms – though don’t expect that initially.

We don’t have much information on O2’s 5G latency, but 2023 data from Speedtest suggests that its median 5G latency is 33ms, so likely lower than 4G latency but not by as much as we’d hope to eventually see.

Still, even this improvement will benefit all sorts of things, including online gaming, loading streamed videos, and excitingly could also help allow for new use cases.

For loaded latency (meaning the latency when the connection is under heavy use) an Ookla report from 2025 found it to be 1039.19ms.

What frequencies/bands does O2 use?

O2 currently uses the 40GHz, 26GHz, 3.6GHz, 3.4GHz and 700MHz frequencies to transmit its 5G signals. In most cases that’s higher than the frequencies it uses for other network types, as the chart above shows.

Being higher frequency tends to mean there’s greater capacity available, which can help with reliability, allowing the network to maintain high and consistent speeds even with loads of simultaneous users.

That’s important, as ever more devices are becoming connected, and – in particular with 5G - data demands are growing.

However, these high frequency bands can’t travel as far as lower frequency ones, and they aren’t as good at penetrating walls and other obstacles – which is why you might sometimes find you have 5G outside but not indoors. These are problems that mobile networks should be able to overcome though.

One way of overcoming this is to leverage low frequency spectrum to make up for these weaknesses. The 700MHz band – some of which was auctioned as part of the UK’s second 5G spectrum auction – has been identified as a candidate for this, though it could also work well for boosting 4G coverage in rural areas.

In terms of its 5G spectrum holdings, O2 currently has access to 800MHz of 26GHz spectrum, 1GHz of 40GHz spectrum, 60MHz of 3.4GHz spectrum, 40MHz of 3.6GHz spectrum, and 20MHz of 700MHz spectrum, for 1,920MHz in total. That’s the same amount as EE but a little less than the combined 2,030MHz total of VodafoneThree.

It’s worth also noting that there may yet be further 5G spectrum auctions in future, so these totals could change over time.