Cardiff Networks Test Dec 2019

On the 14th and 15th of December 2019, Peter, Derico and Jake visited the capital city of Wales to test out the performance of the UK's 4 mobile network operators. Three of the four operators had extensive 5G coverage in the city which drastically affected the results.
For more information on the testing, scroll further down.

Results

We saw the highest download and upload speeds on EE with 531Mbps and 84Mbps respectively, however when it comes to consistency, it was Vodafone who took the top spot. They achieved average download and upload speeds of 214Mbps and 30Mbps respectively. Both EE and Vodafone use Huawei base station equipment in Cardiff which is a potential factor in why these providers did so well.

O2 in Cardiff are quite interesting when it comes to 5G, the operator has unwound multiple sites using Ericsson hardware, but they also have a MORAN sharer with Vodafone for 5G. From our experience the MORAN sites using Huawei equipment greatly out-performed the Ericsson sites however this could be due to other factors such as backhaul constraints on the new unwind sites.

Testing Method

Since 3 of the 4 networks had 5G, it was important that we set a level playing field, and so for those networks (EE, Vodafone and O2) we decided to go for the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G as it supports the n78 band used by all of the operators whilst also sporting upto 5CA with 4x4 MIMO on LTE for high end EN-DC configurations in the city.
Since Three did not have 5G launched at the time of testing, we used a OnePlus 6 for testing their network. This is because the device has 4x4 support for Three's L18 and L21, whilst also supporting CA with their B32.

When it came to testing locations, we chose some important locations in the city such as Cardiff Bay, St David's Shopping Centre, Cardiff's Winter Wonderland and Bute Park. Webpage developed by Jake. Content by Peter, Derico and Jake.