EE could defend its first place from the last public benchmark and is “Best in Test” scoring 882 out of 1,000 points possible and receives the overall grade “very good”. The operator ranks first in all individual disciplines for Voice, Data and Crowdsourcing and in addition has the shortest call setup times. The operator is also making good progress in terms of its 5G rollout. Vodafone ranks second with a score of 809 points and the overall grade “good”. The operator achieves the biggest score improvement over its previous year‘s results with a plus of 34 points. This makes Vodafone the most improved network in the UK this year and closes about 30 percent of the gap to EE. Vodafone showed the best voice performance in London and together with EE on the UK‘s roads. The operator also shows good progress in its 5G rollout. Three is on third place, with 770 points receiving the overall grade “good”. In comparison to its results from the previous year, Three was able to improve its score by 14 points. In the Voice assessment, Three ranks closely together with Vodafone and is particularly strong in the bigger cities. It also provides quite high data throughputs in its 5G network. VMO2 came in fourth, with an improvement of 24 points scoring 700 points and achieving the grade “satisfactory”. This rank is confirmed in all three test categories, Voice, Data and Crowdsourcing. VMO2 scores well in the big city walktests. It achieves a good overall result in London.

Hannes Ruegheimer, editor at connect, concludes: “Congratulations to British Telecom for its brand EE winning our Mobile Network Test in the UK with the highest scores in all test disciplines. Our results reflect a positive trend: Compared to last year, all operators improved their performances, Vodafone and VMO2 had the biggest improvements in score.”

Benchmark methodology

connect’s Mobile Network Test 2024 in the United Kingdom consists of drive tests and walk tests conducted from October 31st to November 17th, 2023. Four drive test cars traveled 19 cities and 38 towns covering 10,430 kilometers. Additionally, two walk test teams visited ten cities and travelled on trains between them as well as to more remote destinations. The selected areas covered 17.70 million people, approximately 26,5% of the UK population. In addition, the results of extensive crowdsourcing analyses, considering 24 weeks from end of May to mid-November 2023 are included in the score. The analyses are based on 10.4 billion data and voice connection samples, statistically representing 99.5% of the built-up area of the UK and 99.9% of the UK population. The results of all three test categories were thoroughly weighed to achieve a realistic and conclusive assessment of each network’s potential and performance.

connect’s independent mobile network tests, conducted by umlaut, provide a fair, transparent and neutral assessment and comparison of the networks’ capabilities to customers, management and supervisory boards of mobile network operators. The assessment was first conducted in Germany more than 20 years ago and has since been extended to Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It has become the de-facto industry standard for customer-perceived network quality.

You can find the entire article here: https://www.connect-testlab.com/…