Data: London last among European capitals for mobile download speeds
October 19, 2026


London packs more jobs and people into its core than any other UK city, and its mobile networks have not kept pace with that demand, reports Ookla. An early start on 5G lifted London to seventh of 18 European capitals for median download speed in 2021, but traffic has since grown faster than capacity, and adding capacity in central London has become harder.

Using Speedtest Intelligence data from 2018 to Q3 2026, alongside background signal measurements and official statistics, Ookla compared London with Europe’s other capitals and the UK’s largest cities, show where its networks strain, and examine why new capacity is so hard to add.


Key Takeaways:

London has fallen from seventh to last among European capitals on median mobile download speed. Its median download speed rose almost sevenfold from Q1 2018 to 109.43 Mbps in Q3 2026, but other capitals improved faster. Since early 2023, it has also had the slowest upload speed of the 18 every quarter, and the highest latency under load for the worst 10 per cent of samples.
5G adoption has outrun 5G capacity. London’s median 5G download speed fell from 200 Mbps in Q2 2021 to 133 Mbps in Q3 2026 as the share of tests on 5G nearly doubled to 80 per cent, leaving it with the slowest 5G median of the 18 capitals. Paris, a comparably large capital, has held its 5G median above 225 Mbps since mid-2021.
London’s networks congest as commuters arrive. In the City of London and Westminster, weekday lunchtime download speeds run 27 per cent slower than at weekends, with 26 per cent higher latency under load. London still has the lowest mobile latency of the 15 UK cities we studied, helped by its place at the center of the UK’s internet.
Adding capacity is getting harder. Applications for new street masts in London have fallen by more than four-fifths since 2022, almost three in four decided since 2019 were refused, and 5G phones in neighborhoods fully covered by conservation areas spend about 4 percentage points less time on 5G.
London’s least affluent neighbourhoods are 18 per cent faster than its most affluent. Within the same borough, about a third of that gap comes from phones spending more time on 5G and about a sixth from denser populations nearby.