Glastonbury hits higher note for mobile performance

While this year’s Glastonbury festival may have hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, detracting from a stellar line-up of global musical acts, some of whom put in what could be career-defining sets, data from mobile analyst Ookla has revealed just how much the UK’s mobile operators have improved their services to fans attending the landmark music event.

The festival began in 1970 and has been based at the same location of Worthy Farm in Somerset in the south-west of England ever since. In 2025, it attracted a crowd of more than 200,000 taking in more than 3,000 performances spread across 100 stages, with headline acts including Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Charlie XcX, The 1975, Olivia Rodrigo and Wolf Alice.

The fans – virtually all with mobile phones – effectively turned the 900-acre site into England’s seventh largest city for the weekend and required the UK’s three leading operators, following the merger of Vodafone and Three, to build a temporary metropolitan-scale network from scratch in under three weeks.

According to Ookla, network performance at the event is crucial given that, like other festivals, it skews to the young, digitally driven, with high disposable income – exactly the demographic operators fight hardest for. As a result, said the analyst firm, it has become a “strategic trifecta” for operators, acting as an engineering showcase, a customer experience litmus test and a flagship moment in a summer-long calendar of music-led brand activations.

The official connectivity partner for 2025 was Vodafone, which gained exclusivity on-site and within the official app, prime logo placement on stage screens and TV broadcasts, and control over experiential zones such as its “Connect & Charge” tent. To that end, said Ookla, every selfie or livestream shared over the partner’s network effectively served as implicit advertising.

Similarly, Glastonbury has also turned it into an important product and technology sandbox that has seen innovations such as geofenced, time-limited eSIM trials and dedicated, custom 5G standalone (SA) network slices for payment terminals. Ookla noted that the crowds create ideal conditions for testing nascent technologies whose value can be hard to demonstrate elsewhere.

The bottom line was that connecting the crowds at rural Worthy Farm – set in open countryside with little permanent fibre or power presence – represents an immense technical challenge. Before the event, Vodafone anticipated record demand, projecting 270TB (terabytes) of traffic on its network during this year’s festival, which is more than it typically carries in several mid-sized UK towns combined over a day.

Assessing individual UK operators’ performances, Ookla found that Three UK saw a significant lead in network performance across key metrics during Glastonbury 2025, thanks mainly to its spectrum advantage. Median mobile download speeds of 347.66Mbps were at least twice as fast as those on any other operator, and the network also topped quality of experience (QoE) measures reflecting the typical performance for web browsing, video calling and gaming throughout the event.

Ookla noted that Three’s structural advantage, particularly its larger contiguous mid-band allocation – roughly twice the width of its rivals – and leaner subscriber base, with fewer users per antenna sector, was likely central to its performance lead.

Overall, the analyst showed festival-goers were least likely to experience poor performance on EE’s network throughout the Worthy Farm site. The data revealed that at the 10th percentile – capturing the slowest 10% of outcomes when signal was weakest or congestion highest – EE still recorded the fastest download and upload speeds of any operator. This translated into mobile users seeing fewer instances of buffering, and even during peak crowd surges, they were more likely to be able to keep streaming and uploading on EE’s network.

Ookla suggested the results reflected the performance benefits conferred by what it called the operator’s unique spectrum diversity, which has enabled it to leverage a broad carrier aggregation mix by combining multiple low- and mid-band carriers.

Even though the network analysis showed Vodafone and O2 lagged on key metrics, both companies were found to have delivered clear improvements in network performance compared with previous festivals.

Ookla attributed O2’s position to its combination of the largest subscriber base, meaning more users per antenna sector, and the smallest deployable spectrum portfolio, particularly for mid-band 4G. Vodafone fared better on most metrics, but recorded the weakest download speed outcomes at the 10th percentile, suggesting more acute congestion issues on its network. However, both operators saw median download speeds rise by at least 25% year on year, indicating that network investments are paying off.