No, you’re not imagining it – the UK’s 5G connection really is crap
T he leafy countryside of Sussex is delightful to drive through, all twisting country lanes and glorious green fields for miles on end. I know because, sat in the passenger seat of a car and hunched over my laptop this past weekend, I had plenty of time to observe it.
While I should have been editing an essay during the 45-minute trip from a beautiful country cafe to the Weald & Downland Living Museum, I was instead spending most of it staring into the middle-distance and swearing under my breath. The 5G mobile internet I had tethered to my laptop kept cutting out with every languorous corner the car took, rendering my work impossible.
You might think that it’s an inevitable consequence of driving through rural parts of the UK. But it’s an issue not only confined to country lanes: you’re also likely to encounter patchy signal in built-up areas. The truth is that every city, town, village and hamlet is affected – albeit to differing degrees – by the same problem: Britain’s 5G connection is decidedly crap.
There’s no other way of putting it. A study conducted by the research firm Opensignal in 2023 found that UK mobile users had the worst average 5G download speeds of all G7 countries. And Japan and the UK are the only countries in that group to have seen performance drop year on year.
