EE offers the best 4G mobile experience

14 October 2019

Mobile experience

Opensignal just shared it’s latest Mobile Network Experience Report and the results tell us that EE customers appear to have picked the best provider. Rivals Vodafone, O2 and Three are far from offering the same that EE does.

It seems that EE has mastered speed and availability, two key things most mobile users rely on.

What exactly did the results say? Take a look down below as we dive into some of the different awards.

4G availability

This test looked at how regularly mobile users had access to 4G. EE won with a staggering 91.2% availability rate. It was the only company to surpass 90%.

EE availability

O2 was second with 85.7% whilst Vodafone wasn’t far behind at 84.2%. This is still a long way from the 90’s and it’ll be interesting to see how everyone fairs when it comes to 5G in the future.

Three was very far behind with only a 76.2% 4G availability rate.

In comparison to last year, EE has added a significant 5% to its availability score. O2 rose by more than 1.5%. While Vodafone and Three increased less than 1%.

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Download speed

Unsurprisingly, if you’re looking for the fastest download speed, EE is your best bet. In fact, EE crushed its opposition by delivering a download speed of 31.5 Mbps.

EE downloads

Vodafone was second and a long way behind, EE still provided download speeds at least 43% faster. Vodafone stood at 22 Mbps.

EE offered download speeds 73% faster than Three, with a score of only 18.2 Mbps.

However, EE is two times faster than O2, which has download speeds of 15.1 Mbps.

It’s worth noting that EE increased its download speed by a significant 2 Mbps in comparison to last year, which pushed it over the 30 Mbps mark. It’s not surprising that EE won this award as the high 4G availability will offer consistently speedy download speeds.

Latency experience

Latency is a measure of the responsiveness to the network. Therefore, the lower the number = the quicker the response time. So, the winner is the one with the lowest number which was, of course, EE.

EE latency

While all four operators did improve on their latency experience in comparison to last year, EE lead the pack by slashing 2 milliseconds off its score.

EE users experienced latencies of 39.2ms. O2 and Vodafone came in almost jointly with a score of 42.7ms and 42.2ms respectively. Three lagged significantly behind with a score of 50.6ms.

Latency is very important when it comes to using 4G or 5G, it really affects the mobile experience. Low latency also helps to boost download and upload speeds.

The overall results

Overall, we can see that EE won every award other than the Voice App Experience. However, all of the awards that are directly affected by network speeds and availability were won by EE. Arguably, these are the most important factors to be the best at as a mobile provider.

Next year, we will see this report covering 5G and it’ll be very interesting to see which provider rules the realm of the brand-new network.

Experienced financial writer, working for esteemed websites such as The Motley Fool. 5G technology writer diving deep into financials and news.

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