Ofcom has just launched its latest Mobile Matters report, where it looks at the network performance of Three, EE, Vodafone, and O2, across the UK, and while there aren’t many surprises, there are a few details of note.
Perhaps most notable, is just how much difference a 5G SA (5G Standalone) network can make compared to a 5G NSA (5G Non-Standalone) one. The latter is what all the UK’s networks initially launched with, and it means a 5G network that still uses some legacy 4G infrastructure, so it’s not actually a full 5G network.
Now the UK’s networks are starting to upgrade to 5G SA, and according to this report, file download times are on average around 45% faster on 5G SA.
The report adds that 70% of 5G SA download speeds reached 100Mbps or higher, compared to just 46% on 5G NSA, and that latency was on average 15% lower on 5G SA.
Oddly, there was a slightly higher connection success rate (97.6%) on 5G NSA than on 5G SA (95.9%), but that’s a negligible difference.
The real current issue with 5G SA is just how limited its availability is – this report found that in the six months to March 2025, only 2% of 5G connections were to standalone networks, which just shows how far the networks need to go in rolling it out.
Lower latencies and predictable stats
Another somewhat interesting element of the report was median latencies, as a lot of network reports don’t include latency for whatever reason.
Here, Ofcom found that the median latency on 5G was 18.2ms in 2025 (down from 18.9ms in 2024). Lower is better with latency, so that’s a slight improvement. Three’s median latency was the lowest of all at 15.3ms, followed by EE at 17.2ms, then Vodafone at 20.1ms, and finally O2 at 21.3ms. In all cases this was better than 4G latency, which had a median of 21.1ms across the UK’s networks in 2025.
The rest of the report largely echoes things we’ve seen in previous studies, with for example EE having the highest proportion of 5G network connections at 32% (suggesting it’s 5G coverage may be the best), while Vodafone had the lowest at 24%.
Three meanwhile tended to have the highest 5G download speeds, while EE’s were the highest over 4G, and EE also had the highest proportion of upload speeds of 20Mbps or higher across both 5G and 4G.
And unsurprisingly, 5G was found to be both more widely available and faster in urban locations than rural ones – the latter presumably being because you’re likely to be in closer proximity to a mast.
Still, between latencies lowering and the immense potential of 5G SA, there have been some clear improvement in 5G overall, and the future looks very bright for the technology – just as long as networks start speeding up their investment in 5G SA.
