Tesco Mobile 5G Coverage

Last updated 12th February, 2026

Tesco Mobile’s 5G network is available in parts of thousands of UK towns and cities at the time of writing. Tesco uses O2’s infrastructure, so it has coverage in all the same places, and as O2’s 5G network grows, so will Tesco’s.

Tesco Mobile launched its 5G service on 3rd March 2020, making it the fourth MVNO to do so. We’d expect its coverage will grow rapidly, but it’s worth noting that right now even the places that have 5G won’t always have comprehensive coverage – though that’s true of every network.

Below we’ve highlighted all the key places that currently have Tesco Mobile 5G, as well as looking at other aspects of its 5G service, and how it compares to other UK networks.

Tesco Mobile Coverage

To get a clearer idea of Tesco Mobile’s 5G coverage in your area, just type out your postcode into our coverage checker box at the top of this page.

Our coverage checker will then tell you how good Tesco Mobile’s 5G coverage is in that area, as well as how good its 4G and voice coverage is – and we’ll also show how other networks perform there, so you can see if any alternatives are better.

The data we use comes both from the UK’s mobile networks and from independent sources, so it’s comprehensive, and it’s as up to date as possible too, because we use real-time data.

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

We keep track of which networks offer 5G coverage across 120 major UK towns and cities, so you can see at a glance how they compare in key locations.

Tesco Mobile has the same number of 5G locations as O2 below:

Note that a tick in the chart below just means that a network claims to have some 5G coverage in that town or city – not that there will be 5G coverage everywhere in the region.

On top of which, even areas that have outdoor 5G coverage won’t always have it indoors at the moment. So it’s worth using our coverage checker or a network’s official coverage checker to be sure you can get 5G where you need it. That said, coverage is rapidly improving, so if you don’t have it now, you might do soon.

Tesco Mobile relies on O2 for 5G coverage, and the most recent places that O2 has brought 5G to (as of September 2025) include parts of the Outer Hebrides, along with Preston and Walsall.

4G coverage

Tesco Mobile of course still offers 4G and 2G coverage alongside 5G.

Tesco Mobile (through O2’s infrastructure and spectrum) has roughly 99% 4G population coverage, which is similar to all its UK rivals as you can see in the table below.

How fast is Tesco Mobile’s 5G network?

There isn’t much data on Tesco Mobile’s 5G speeds yet, but the network has talked about average download speeds of around 200Mbps, making it around 13 times faster than the 15Mbps that it claims is the average speed of its 4G network.

Beyond that, we can look at data on O2’s speeds since Tesco uses O2’s network. For that, in RootMetrics data for the first half of 2025, it was found that O2’s median 5G download speed was an unimpressive 98.7Mbps. Its 95th percentile 5G download speed (meaning in the top 5% of speeds it delivered) was 323.2Mbps, and its 5th percentile 5G download speed (so its bottom 5% one) was 5.1Mbps, all of which is lower than EE, Three or Vodafone.

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

Plus, in September 2024, Opensignal reported that O2’s average 5G download speed was 80.1Mbps.

Latency

Latency is how long a mobile network takes to respond to a request before it starts transferring data. Even though it’s measured in milliseconds (ms), latency can have a noticeable impact on how fast a network feels – so the lower it is the better.

Tesco Mobile has said to expect latency of under 10ms ultimately on 5G, while 4G latency tends to be around 40-50ms. Elsewhere we’ve heard that eventually 5G could even offer latency as low as 1ms. According to 2023 data from Speedtest though, O2’s median 5G latency stands at 33ms.

That’s unloaded latency, while for loaded latency (which is the latency when the connection is under heavy use) an Ookla report from 2025 found that O2’s was 1039.19ms.

What frequencies/bands does Tesco Mobile use?

Tesco Mobile uses the same 5G frequencies as O2, which at the time of writing means the 40GHz, 26GHz, 3.6GHz, 3.4GHz and 700MHz bands. They’re the main bands used by all the UK’s networks for 5G currently.

These bands are mostly high frequency, which generally means there’s more capacity available, which in turn can help boost simultaneous connections and reliability. With the heavy demands that 5G will place on networks, that’s important.

As the chart above shows, various lower frequency bands are used for 4G and 2G. These don’t tend to have as much available capacity, but they do travel further, and are better able to pass through obstacles such as buildings.

In terms of how much 5G spectrum Tesco Mobile has access to – it shares O2’s 800MHz of 26GHz spectrum, 1GHz of 40GHz spectrum, 60MHz of 3.4GHz spectrum, 40MHz of 3.6GHz spectrum, and 20MHz of 700MHz spectrum, so it has 1,920MHz in total – an amount that’s equal to EE but less than the 2,030MHz combined total of VodafoneThree