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Mobile operator EE (BT) has once again come top in the annual 2026 umlaut connect UK Mobile Network Test, which deployed a range of different benchmarks to test 4G and 5G performance (voice and broadband) across 16 cities, 24 smaller towns and along 10,170km of major roads. On the flip side, O2 (Virgin Media) continued to be ranked at the bottom.
The study’s more scientific focused drivetests and walktests were both conducted between 27th October to 8th November 2025 using Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Smartphones for each operator. Additionally, some of the walk test teams visited several cities and travelled on trains between them. The test area accounts for 16.7 million people, or approximately 24.9% of the total population of the United Kingdom.
On top of that, the analysts also harnessed crowdsourced data, which was collected over 24 weeks from the end of May to early November 2025. A total of 5,702 million data samples were collected by this method from mobile phone users across the UK, which stems from tests conducted via various Smartphone apps with a special background diagnosis process.
Overall, EE came top in all three of the primary data, voice and crowdsourced testing categories, scoring a total of 920 points (up from 913 last year) out of a possible 1,000. Following them were Vodafone on 808 (down from 815), Three UK on 799 (up from 765) and finally, at the bottom, was O2 on 768 (up from 729) – though they did once again improve their score. Otherwise, this marks the eleventh time in a row that EE has topped the study.
Maziar Kianzad, Global Network Benchmarking Lead at umlaut, said:
“Congratulations to British Telecom for its brand EE winning our Mobile Network Test in the UK for the eleventh time in a row. The operator achieves the highest scores in all test disciplines and scores ahead of the other operators – at a gap of more than 100 points. Vodafone achieves a good second place. Three manages to clearly improve compared to its result from the previous year. The biggest score improvement, achieved up to now in our current benchmarking season, is however obtained by VMO2 – nationwide, and also in London.”
The Full Report includes a lot more data, and we’ve pasted some of that below, although it’s wise to read the main report in order to get the correct context. For example, the first output below depicts the 5G based mobile broadband data rates that the study got when conducting a simple 7-second download test (note: the column headed “0 (Mbps)” should really be called “Average (Mbps)” – this looks like an error). The second image after that shows the crowdsourced results.
7 Second Download Test on 5G Connections
Crowdsource Results
