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It’s no secret that London has terrible phone service. Struggling to send a text on Stoke Newington’s Church Street or open your emails in Covent Garden is a frustratingly familiar feeling. But which area really has it the worst?
A very precise picture of the capital’s true phone service issues has been developed. Mayor Sadiq Khan has launched a plan to eradicate ‘dead zones’ (we’re looking at you, Liverpool Street) and sluggish network speeds across the capital. An interactive map of the city’s mobile coverage measured every part of London against four factors including signal strength and download speed.
Researchers hit the pavements across 19 neighbourhoods during the busy Christmas shopping season, testing four anonymised phone networks. They then merged those results with connectivity data expert Ookla’s Speedtest, which was crowdsourced from users. This gives us an accurate picture of Greater Londoner’s connectivity issues.
The stats show that overall, London’s download and upload speeds were actually good, and even surpassed Ofcom’s minimum by quite a bit. Where the city struggled the most was in the ‘latency’ category. Okay, allow us to get technical, latency is a network response time, such as how long it takes to load a webpage or hear the other person you’re calling. All 19 areas surveyed exceeded the Ofcom minimum. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 5G was ‘widely available’ but ‘unevenly deployed’, with Brick Lane, Dalston and Eversholt Street having weak or absent 5G coverage.
When it came to measuring signal strength, researchers found a ‘doughnut hole’ of weak coverage (yum). Signal is lacking in inner north and east London, including ‘most’ areas of Camden, Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. Soz, Zone 2.
In comparison, every area of City of London had good signal strength, as did all the surveyed spots in Chelsea, Newham, Lambeth and Hammersmith and Fulham.
Across all four categories (download speed, upload speed, signal strength and latency) the following areas were deemed the best performing overall. But the report notes that user experiences can be more nuanced (apparently Old Street is the best, according to users). At the top was Fleet Street, at number two was Stratford followed by Cheapside, the road next to St Paul’s Cathedral.
The worst area overall was Eversholt Street in Camden, followed by Dalston – its score was dragged down by weak signal and upload speeds – and Brick Lane.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said: ‘This new evidence and map will help us understand where improvements are needed and work with boroughs and mobile operators to deliver better connectivity, building a fairer and more prosperous London for everyone.’
London’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell MBE added: ‘There is still more to do. Understanding the quality of mobile signals has been too opaque for too long.
‘These groundbreaking new tools will provide us with an in-depth look at the connectivity challenges we’re facing across London, giving us the evidence we need to target investment in the right areas and improve digital connectivity for Londoners.’
Why is the service so bad, exactly? Find out here.
Plus: Did you know that all Underground lines will get high-speed mobile coverage by the end of the year?
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