Have you noticed a lag while watching YouTube or Netflix on your phone when you connect to the mobile data?
Turns out, it’s not just you, a lot of other customers in UK are also facing the exact same problem. And this has finally been proved by research.
According to the recent study conducted by What?, mobile users in UK can only access high-speed 4G connectivity 53% of time on average.
The research compared UK 4G Mobile Coverage to 39 other countries. In all the other countries, users were able to access 4G connectivity at least 60% of the total time.
UK 4G Mobile Coverage tested on 4 networks
The research was carried on by mobile coverage experts OpenSignal along with the experienced consumer group Which?. The test was conducted on several mobile networks in UK – EE, O2, Three and Vodafone.
When the mobile network does not provide 4G connectivity, it automatically turns to 3G to make sure the phone is still connected to the internet. But this obviously is disappointing to the users, since they are specifically paying for 4G speeds and at the end of the day, they are only getting 3G connectivity.
Coming to the results, they definitely weren’t as expected.
The best performing mobile network with the best UK 4G Mobile Coverage was EE. It got 4G signals 60.6% of the time.
The second best performing mobile network was O2 with 59% and Vodafone came with 57% 4G data connectivity at all times.
But, the worst performing network was Three. Users were only able to access 4G connectivity 39.8% of the time.
Though surprisingly, Three had the best download speed among all the mobile networks and provided a speed of 18.7 Mbps. EE had the second best download speed at 17.8 Mbps, O2 came third at 12.1 Mbps and Vodafone came last at 11.8 Mbps.
The study was conducted with the help of 30,000 registered users who had to install OpenSignal’s app on their mobile phones. The app then scanned the internet speed every 15 minutes to check the proportion of 4G speed that was available on the mobile phone. The main goal of the report was to push the mobile networks to provide better speeds to all its consumers.
It was definitely shocking to see that UK 4G Mobile Coverage is being outperformed by more than 39 countries, even though the users in the UK pay premium rates. When the customers are paying 100% of the rates, there is no reason why they should be only getting 4G connectivity 39% of the time.
The director of Which? Richard Lloyd said in a statement, “Almost everyone now uses a mobile phone service and it’s not good enough that the UK is lagging behind so many countries with our 4G network coverage. Increasing 4G access should be a priority for mobile providers and Ofcom must continue to push them to make this a reality.”
