Giffgaff 5G coverage and roll-out

Last updated 27th January, 2026

GiffGaff uses O2's network, meaning you'll enjoy the same coverage as you would on O2.

Giffgaff launched its 5G service on October 20, 2020, which is almost exactly a year after O2 did. 5G is available in all the same places as O2, meaning well over 3,200 UK towns and cities at the time of writing. And as O2’s 5G coverage increases, Giffgaff’s will too.

Giffgaff Coverage

While Giffgaff’s 5G service is available in a lot of places now, you still can’t get it everywhere, so to check whether it’s available where you are, just enter your postcode – or any other postcode you want to check – in our coverage checker at the top of this page.

Our coverage checker aims to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date picture of 5G coverage on each network, as it uses real-time data from both the UK’s mobile networks and third-party sources.

So what you see should be accurate, and as well as 5G, you’ll also see an indication of 4G and voice coverage in the area, and a comparison to the UK’s other networks.

How does Giffgaff'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.

The chart below lists the locations in full, with a tick against them meaning a network has some coverage there. However, in many cases it won’t be complete coverage, so it’s worth using a network’s official coverage checker or our coverage checker above to see how patchy it is. Sometimes 5G coverage will also differ indoors and outside. That said, every network is improving its 5G coverage rapidly.

The latest places to get O2 5G (as of January 2026) include parts of the Outer Hebrides, plus Preston, and Walsall.

4G coverage

Giffgaff of course also offers 4G coverage, and at the time of writing this will be a lot more widespread than 5G.

Giffgaff (through O2’s infrastructure and spectrum) has roughly 99% population coverage with 4G, which is broadly in line with rivals, as you can see above.

How fast is GiffGaff's 5G network?

We don’t have much information about Giffgaff’s 5G speeds yet, but the network has said you should be able to download an hour-long TV episode in around 17 seconds on average, or potentially as little as three seconds if you’re right by a mast.

Beyond that, we can look at data on O2’s speeds to get an idea, given that Giffgaff uses O2’s network. On that front, we have O2 data from RootMetrics for the first half of 2025, which found O2’s median 5G download speed was an unimpressive 98.7Mbps. The report also found that its 95th percentile speed (which would be close to the highest speed O2 recorded) was 323.2Mbps, and its 5th percentile one (meaning almost the lowest) was 5.1Mbps.

There’s also Ookla testing from the second half of 2025, which put O2’s median 5G download speed at 78.92Mbps and its 90th percentile 5G download speed at 268.42Mbps.

And we have an Opensignal report from September 2024, which found O2’s average 5G download speed to be 80.1Mbps. That notably is lower than Three, EE, or Vodafone’s results.

While those speeds are variable, they’re all a big upgrade on 4G, which averages 18.2Mbps on O2 according to an October 2020 Opensignal report. We’re using this older report because the newer ones don’t include speed results just for 4G.

Latency

Latency is how long a mobile network takes to respond to a request before it starts transferring data. So even with high speeds, if latency is also high it can make some things feel slow, even though it’s measured in milliseconds (ms).

Giffgaff hasn’t said anything about its 5G latency, but according to 2023 data from Speedtest, O2’s median 5G latency is 33ms, while its loaded latency (in other words the latency when the connection is under heavy use) in a 2025 Ookla report was found to be 1039.19ms. It’s been said though that eventually 5G could offer latency as low as 1ms. For reference, 4G latency tends to be around 30-50ms.

What frequencies/bands does GiffGaff use?

All mobile signals travel on frequencies, and for 5G it’s typically high frequencies that are used – as you can see in the chart above, Giffgaff uses the 40GHz band, the 26GHz band, the 3.4GHz band, and the 3.6GHz band, all of which are higher than any it uses for 3G or 4G.

One reason for using higher frequency spectrum is that it’s available in greater capacities, which can help deal with lots of connections and big data demands – two things which are vital for a 5G network. The lower frequencies though can travel further and penetrate obstacles better.

Those advantages mean that Giffgaff (through O2) might also use some 700MHz spectrum for 5G.

Giffgaff through O2 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 at the time of writing, so that’s 1,920MHz in total, which is the same as EE and less than the combined 2,030MHz total of VodafoneThree.

However, there may eventually be more spectrum auctioned off, so these totals could change.