While EE get the best results from Freshwave's neutral network, non-joiners Three are keeping pace
The City of London’s Square Mile is one of the UK’s economic powerhouses – playing host to the Bank of London and the iconic St Paul’s cathedral as well as numerous museums and tourist attractions.
However, like much of London, complaints have been made about the quality of mobile signal. London City Councillors have complained in recent meetings about inadequate service and frequent frustration in what should be an incredibly advanced metropolitan centre.
To remedy this, an ambitious ‘small cell’ project was launched by network company Freshwave. The project initially saw 25 neutral network boxes placed around the city of London, everywhere from Threadneedle Street to St Pauls.
The neutral network system requires mobile network operators to sign up for the service and Freshwave says it helps consumers get faster 4G and 5G.
With the announcement that both Vodafone and O2 are now also taking advantage of Freshwave’s signal boosting tech alongside EE, who were the earliest adopter back in 2023, we decided to test around the Square Mile using the SignalTracker app.
Speaking to SignalTracker, Freshwave said they now have 83 sites in the City with plans to build another 30 over the next year.
To see how much difference Freshwave is making we also tested with a Three phone, as it does not use their network. Testing was performed in the early rush to work on a weekday, as frustration strikes many mid-commute.
While Freshwave have not been completely clear as to the location of their signal boxes, they have specifically mentioned St Paul’s and Threadneedle Street, so we took a stroll through the area as many commuters do every day.
To begin with the most iconic structure in the Square Mile, St Paul’s Cathedral, this area is where I experienced the best coverage of our survey. On EE, I was getting consistent 5G in the churchyard of the cathedral and the gardens bordering New Change Road.
100% of my tests in the churchyard, gardens and New Change regions came back as 5G on EE with 60% of those tests being standalone. 5G standalone is generally ten times faster than 4G, whereas it’s counterpart 5G non-standalone is slower and relies on pre-existing 4G architecture.
O2 in this area tested 100% for 4G displaying the 5G icon, which means that the device was connected to a 4G base station with 5G capabilities that were not being used.
EE has the best results for 5G
Vodafone’s results were mid-pack for the area, the majority being 5G non-standalone however, which is good. In the gardens, many of the tests came back as 4G with a 5G icon.
In this case, it was a 50/50 split from the churchyard to New Change and into Cannon Street.
What about the Three device that we tested? While occasionally dropping down to 4G in the garden, it maintained 5G non-standalone in 45% of tests. This places it above O2, who were recently signed up to Freshwave’s service.
Now let’s head towards the Bank of England. The Cannon Street road, leading to a junction with Queen Victoria Road and branching off into Queen Street and Cheapside is a place of vibrant shops, pubs and cafes as well as Mansion House Station.
EE’s ability to use 5G begins to falter here. Down Cannon Street and through Cheapside, 41.5% of our tests on EE were 5G, with 12.5% being the slower non-standalone service. More 4G results begin to appear from the mobile operator, with our tests recording 58% as the older mobile generation.
O2’s results are impressive while EE declined slightly
25% of our total EE tests were 4G with a 5G icon despite the benefits Freshwave clearly has on their coverage.
For Vodafone, results are similarly a downgrade from the St Paul’s area. 37% of tests came back as 5G while the majority of tests (63%) were 4G, Of those 4G results, 42% of them were when displaying a 5G icon.
O2 had 5G in 45% of our tests, 55% being on some form of 4G. However, this is a higher percentage of the time than Vodafone and EE, proving O2 has some consistency with its coverage of the Square Mile while lacking the clear boost EE receives.
Again, what about the non-affiliated Three? Surprisingly, Three held up well despite its lack of access to Freshwave’s network. 43% of their tests were 5G, almost as good as O2 and beating Vodafone. While this is also a higher percentage of 5G than EE, the benefits of standalone are too much to declare that Three is better.
Three performed well down the famous street
Housing both the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, Threadneedle Street is one of the best known streets in the City. Despite this, it is also where our tests were the worst. Our EE survey came back as 100% 4G in the area, despite the excellent performance around St Paul’s.
Similarly with O2, our results across Prince’s Street, Cornhill and Threadneedle Street were 100% 4G with a 5G icon, making O2 the most egregious for this misleading and confusing phenomenon that has been discussed at length across other SignalTracker articles.
Vodafone outperformed both EE and O2 in this historic region of London. 65% of results in our tests came back for 5G, a vast improvement over the other two operators. Vodafone is a relative latecomer to the neutral network system compared to EE, which makes it odd that in regions like this, it outperforms them.
Three, as our non-aligned operator, did well in the Threadneedle Street area. 66% of our tests were 5G putting it on par with Vodafone and eclipsing O2 and EE.
For Three to perform to well, despite no relation to Freshwave, proves the strength of their pre-existing network in the City.
Now let’s compare download speeds. 20 Mbps and upwards is what we judge as a good mobile download speed, that covers a huge swathe of actions from checking WhatsApp to streaming music, video and downloading files.
Starting with EE – the average download speed on 5G was 95.04 Mbps, which is incredibly fast. The speed on non-standalone was a respectable 39.5 Mbps with 4G averaging to 36.40 Mbps, not much different from 5G non-standalone in practice.
O2 had the fastest 5G speeds in our tests followed by EE.
Vodafone had a similar average download speed on 5G non-standalone of 36.22 Mbps – however 4G averaged just 26.74 Mbps.
Our O2 average was incredibly fast on 5G non-standalone, beating EE with a 129.61 Mbps average. This means you could comfortably stream 4K videos to your device while out in certain parts of the City. However, the drop down to the far more prevalent 4G is 31.38 Mbps, which is solid but not “fast”.
Defying expectations, my tests with Three resulted in an average of 52.68 Mbps 5G non-standalone download speeds and 47.76 Mbps 4G download speeds. This beat Vodafone outright even with the assistance of Freshwave’s network boosting technology.
While the benefits of the neutral network are absolutely being felt across the city, proved best in the shockingly fast speeds on EE’s 5G network around St Pauls, our tests also reveal that there is less of a boost than it may first appear. Three holds up well despite not being signed up to Freshwave’s service but are still marginally worse than Vodafone, O2 and EE. However, Vodafone and O2 often lag behind the clearly established EE – they are the fastest 5G network in the city and Freshwave’s rollout has helped that.
It is worth noting just how close some of these results are: Three and their MVNOs (ID, Smarty and others) are absolutely on par with their competition, despite the lack of a Freshwave partnership.
Check out SignalTracker’s Central London survey, which tests how the cheapest network offerings perform in the entire central London region.
Download the SignalTracker app for free on the Google Play Store.
