Smartphone Cities – Measuring mobile broadband and voice performance

The UK is increasingly becoming a smartphone society, with 70% of all adults owning a smartphone in the second half of 2015, making the performance of mobile networks more important than ever.
Smartphone Cities provides information on mobile network performance across five UK cities: Cardiff, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London and Norwich, chosen because all four mobile network operators (EE, O2, Three and Vodafone) had rolled out 4G networks there at the time of our testing.
Our results provide a snapshot of performance in November and December 2015. All operators carried out varying degrees of maintenance on their networks during our test period which may have impacted on their results.  All results were gathered on a 4G tariff, unless stated otherwise, with our five cities each having comparable levels of 4G coverage during testing.
Network performance is only one of the factors that a consumer is likely to take into account when choosing a mobile phone service. This report is part of a wider programme of work by Ofcom into mobile quality of service, which includes our interactive coverage maps.