Broadband and mobile operator Vodafone UK has, for the third year running, topped a new network benchmarking study of 4G and 5G (mobile broadband and calls) performance across London, which was conducted by the Berlin-based NET CHECK group. But sadly Three UK found themselves at the bottom of the study.
As before this study, which involved a mix of driving tests that were performed by NET CHECK’s team between 7th and 13th April 2026, was carried out across all 32 London boroughs and the City of London area using Samsung S25+ smartphones (newer than the S23’s used in last year’s report). The measurement technicians drove 24 routes and covered a distance of 1,109km across Greater London.
NOTE: The maximum ranking for an operator is 1,000 points, where 350 points is the maximum for voice services and 650 is the maximum for data services.
The testing itself involved a range of voice and data service categories including, accessibility, reliability, speech quality and mobile broadband speed-tests using customer applications such as the browsing of popular web pages, video streaming and more. For data (mobile broadband) services, a total of around 14,600 data samples per operator were collected. For voice services, around 1,300 test calls were made and 14 speech samples were collected in each test call, resulting in a total of around 17,600 speech samples.
Overall, Vodafone scored the highest number of ranking points – 957.73 out of a possible 1,000 points (up from 932.83 in 2025). By comparison EE ranked second on 951.04 (up from 923.45), followed by O2 on 910.14 (up from 834.16) and finally Three UK on 904.01 (up sharply from 757.82). But it’s worth noting that the VodafoneThree merger will have impacted these results and so it might have been better to score them as one operator.
The study summarises its results in detail below, although you can read the full report to get the proper context for each measurement.
According to Vodafone, Londoners make 14.5 million calls and use 1.9 PetaBytes (PD) of data on an average weekday on their network (compared with 2025, data usage has increased by 12%). The operator also revealed that Brits send 110 different messages each day, shop online 22 times a week (once more than they check their bank balance) and the UK’s top message is “love you”, with Liverpool named the UK’s “love you” capital after a third of respondents chose it.
The operator added that Londoners make 19 calls a day, four more than the national average, while Brits listen to an average of 185 songs on their phones each week. Finally, Vodafone said they’d now “improved” more than 10,000 masts so that 28.6 million Vodafone and Three UK customers are starting to benefit from improved mobile connectivity and capacity.