Virgin Mobile 5G coverage and roll-out

Virgin Mobile uses Vodafone’s 5G infrastructure, meaning it’s available in parts of the same 138 UK towns and cities at the time of writing.

Virgin Mobile launched its 5G service on January 25^th, 2021, and it was available in 100 places on day one. Its coverage will also improve as Vodafone’s does, so if you can’t get Virgin Mobile 5G where you are currently, you likely will be able to sooner or later.

We’ve included full details of Virgin Mobile’s 5G network below, including a list of key coverage locations, spectrum and speed details, and information on how Virgin Mobile’s 5G coverage compares to other UK networks.

Virgin Mobile 5G Summary

How does Virgin Mobile’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.

Virgin Mobile has the same number of 5G locations as Vodafone below:

• O2 has launched 5G in 81 of the 120 locations below. 
• Three has launched 5G in 99 of the 120 locations below. 
• EE has launched 5G in 102 of the 120 locations below. 
• Vodafone has launched 5G in 47 of the 120 locations below. 

Note that a tick against one of the towns or cities below means a network offers some coverage there, but its coverage won’t necessarily be comprehensive. Many locations currently have quite patchy 5G coverage, but this will improve over time.

You should also be aware that buildings can affect signal, so even if there’s 5G coverage outside somewhere, it might not penetrate some buildings.

Check Virgin Mobile coverage

Latest locations to get Virgin Mobile 5G

Virgin Mobile launched its 5G service on 25/01/2021, with the latest locations since then to have got 5G including the following:

• Watford, Rickmansworth, Wigan and Golborne.

Virgin Mobile coverage checker

You can check Virgin Mobile’s coverage using its online coverage tool. This will ask you first whether you’re already a customer or whether you’re planning to buy a phone or a SIM card, then you can enter a location to get a picture of Virgin’s coverage there.

This will show you the 4G, 3G, and 2G coverage as well as 5G, and if you hit the ‘data speed info’ button you can also see speed estimates.

4G coverage

If you’re not in a 5G coverage area then you’ll be using 4G or 3G, and – for 5G customers at any rate – Virgin Mobile relies on Vodafone for that too. However, the company is in the confusing position of using EE’s 4G and 3G coverage for customers who haven’t moved to a 5G plan.

Our focus is 5G, and therefore in this case Vodafone’s coverage, but both Vodafone and EE have excellent 4G availability, so whatever plan you’re on you shouldn’t have anything to worry about there, as the chart below shows.

5G roaming

Virgin Mobile only allows customers to roam at up to 4G speeds at the time of writing, but you can roam like that across the EU.

5G network speeds

There isn’t much data on Virgin Mobile’s 5G speeds, but according to Vodafone you can expect an average 5G download speed of 176Mbps on Virgin, which it claims is around 4.5 times faster than the network’s average 4G speeds. And as Virgin uses Vodafone’s infrastructure we can also look at some of the data for that network.

For one thing, based on September 2020 data from Point Topic, Vodafone has an average 5G download speed in the UK of 143.6Mbps, while its median 5G download speed was found to be 129Mbps, and its maximum was recorded as 415Mbps.

We’ve also seen Speedtest/Ookla data from the first half of 2021, which suggested that Vodafone’s median 5G download speed was similar at 159Mbps. Again, this is Vodafone we’re talking about rather than Virgin Mobile, but as the infrastructure is the same the results should be in the right ballpark.

Elsewhere, RootMetrics recorded a fastest median speed of 255.8Mbps for Vodafone in the second half of 2021, and a fastest ‘everyday 5G’ speed of 192.2Mbps (which used a mix of 5G-only and switching between 5G and 4G for the same task) during the first half of 2021. While in a slightly older report from 2020, RootMetrics recorded a top speed for Vodafone of 545.6Mbps.

Latency

We don’t have any data on Virgin Mobile’s 5G latency yet, but as with speeds it’s likely to be similar to Vodafone’s, and that network had a 5G latency of 34ms (milliseconds) in central London, according to a RootMetrics report from late 2020.

Latency can affect the speed of a network, as it’s a measure of how long the network takes to respond to a request, and on 4G networks it tends to be in the 30-50ms range. So it looks like Vodafone’s (and therefore likely Virgin’s) 5G latency is right at the bottom end of that, and it’s likely to get better over time.

Virgin Mobile’s 5G frequency allocation

The table above shows Vodafone’s frequency allocation, with 5G at the top and other network types lower down. Presumably, Virgin Mobile has access to all the same frequencies, though that hasn’t been confirmed. At the very least though, its 5G access will be via the 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz bands.

These frequencies are what mobile signals are broadcast on, and the higher the frequency the greater the available capacity (in general), which is why the highest frequencies in that chart are used for 5G – because high capacity is vital for maintaining high speeds and reliability as data demands grow.

However, high frequency spectrum is also worse at travelling over long distances or passing through obstacles (such as walls) than lower frequencies. For that reason, some networks might start using recently auctioned 700MHz spectrum for 5G too, though Vodafone/Virgin Mobile don’t currently have access to this.

Vodafone (and therefore Virgin Mobile) has access to 50Mhz of 3.4GHz spectrum and 40MHz of 3.6GHz spectrum currently, so 90Mhz in total, putting it in a solid position in terms of capacity, as EE and O2 each only have 80Mhz of 5G spectrum. However, Three is in the lead on that front with 140Mhz of 5G spectrum. And these totals don’t include spectrum in the 700MHz band – factor that in and O2 has 100MHz, EE has 120MHz, and Three has 160MHz.