4G Speeds Average Over 15Mbps in UK

On Thursday, Ofcom revealed its first ever 4G research report citing average 4G speeds twice as fast as their 3G counterparts.

In its research, Ofcom looked at the performance of 3G and 4G services on smartphones from the UK's four main mobile operators - EE, O2, Three, and Vodafone - across five major UK cities - Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, and Manchester - between March and June 2014. "Helping to improve mobile coverage and quality of service are important objectives for Ofcom," said the company in a statement. "Today's report is intended to help consumers understand differences in performance between 3G and 4G, and this kind of research is designed to support consumers in choosing a service that best suits their needs. The findings are also expected to encourage providers to improve their performance."

"Our results show that, on average, UK 4G networks perform much better than 3G networks," said Ofcom. "These differences are consistent across all mobile operators, and we would expect consumers to notice material differences in the performance of mobile broadband when using any 4G network compared to a 3G network." Of the networks, EE offered the fastest 4G speeds across the five cities at 18.4 Mbps while London had the fastest 4G web browsing speeds of all the cities. Three, the only operator offering 4G for free, lagged behind in 4G speeds; in the three month period, Three's average 4G speeds were just 10.7 while EE's average was 18.4. Glasgow's average 4G web browsing speeds were the lowest of the five cities, taking 0.82 seconds to load a web page, while London's average was just 0.72 seconds to load a standard web page.

Photo: © Creative Commons - Flickr: steefafa.