London falling behind in 5G mobile experience

A study from connectivity intelligence provider Ookla has revealed the UK’s capital lags behind the country’s large cities across key 5G performance indicators – with the gap widening – and that mobile users in London spend more time in signal not-spots with no service than residents of other UK cities, reflecting lingering coverage gaps indoors and across key transport routes.

As it made its analysis – comparing how London’s 5G performance stood up to other UK cities, including Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast – Ookla emphasised the global importance of London as home to one of the world’s largest and most lucrative service hubs, supporting a “vast” network of finance and technology firms.

Furthermore, it stressed how beyond its strategic time zone and English-language advantage for accessing both American and Asian markets, London’s prosperity has been founded on the availability of world-class infrastructure that facilitates doing business.

Yet the study highlighted how the city’s reputation for international competitiveness has not been matched by the quality of its telecommunications infrastructure. In particular, it has shown how London’s mobile users are experiencing frequent issues using mobile devices indoors, underground and in busy areas.

Ookla regarded London’s underperformance at the lower percentiles of measures like download speeds as particularly notable, as it said this strongly reflected the experience of mobile users in more challenging conditions such as at the network edge, during peak hours or in congested areas. Additionally, the city’s lower consistency score and weaker download and upload speeds were seen as suggesting that Londoners are more likely to encounter poor mobile performance compared with residents of other major UK cities. These problems typically manifest as poor quality of experience in everyday tasks such as web browsing, video streaming and gaming.

Worryingly for the capital city, Ookla observed that what it called London’s “marked underperformance” makes the UK unique in Western European terms – not only are the disparities between its major cities wider, but it’s also unusual for the capital to be the primary laggard.

Specifically, the study found that in the first quarter of 2025, London trailed other UK cities in 5G network consistency – a key indicator of performance at the lower end of the user experience – as well as in median download and upload speeds. Mobile users in London and Belfast experienced the weakest outcomes among UK cities, with median 5G download speeds of approximately 115 Mbps in both cities, significantly behind Glasgow’s 185 Mbps.

The study discovered that the proportion of Londoners spending the majority of their time in locations with no service (0.7%) remained higher than in other UK cities in Q1 2025, but has improved significantly from 3.7% in Q1 2023. This progress, said Ookla, reflected operator investments in network densification through small cells and the ongoing roll-out of mobile coverage across the London Underground which have together enhanced overall network availability in the capital.

Time spent on 2G networks increased, however, across several UK cities over the past year, including Birmingham and Manchester, as the advancement of the 3G sunset in the UK contributed to greater propensity for 2G fallback.

In Q1 2024, Leeds led UK cities in 5G availability, with a 21 percentage-point gap above the national average. Yet the study showed that by Q1 2025, London had taken the lead in 5G availability among major UK cities, and that gap above the national average had narrowed to 13 percentage points. This trend, said the analyst, highlighted progress in 5G network expansion in smaller UK towns and rural areas in recent months, which has moved at a faster pace than coverage improvements in larger cities.

Overall, Ookla measurements showed median 5G download speeds fell by more than 7% on average across major UK cities between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, likely reflecting the impact of shifting network load from older technologies onto 5G, which contributed to broader improvements in overall mobile network performance in most UK cities in the same period.