As the UK’s mobile market has changed to be more competitive through the merger of Vodafone and Three, the UK’s consolidation from four mobile networks to three has been evident in controlled testing data in the first half of 2026, according to Ookla’s RootScore analysis of UK mobile performance.
In the analysis, using more than 600,000 real-world tests, RootMetrics technicians investigated 16 metro markets within the UK – namely, the country’s major cities and the populated areas around them – between January and June 2026. It stressed that it was able to capture data from the VodafoneThree integration by doing its test at this time.
The test recorded a Three technology mix that it said registered little change compared with late 2025. Tests made from May 2026 onward, after cross-network roaming had scaled nationally and core-level sharing across more than 10,000 sites was completed late in the month, were found to have showed progressively larger shifts of Three’s task time from 5G onto 4G, alongside similarly timed jumps in Vodafone’s top-end download and upload speeds.
Ookla added that the test period was notable because it was a year after VodafoneThree signed its £11bn, eight-year network commitment, with delivery overseen by UK regulator Ofcom and the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Additionally, it noted that Virgin Media O2 committed a second consecutive £700m a year to its mobile transformation programme during this time; while EE, which has been the leader in RootMetrics controlled metro testing for over a decade, pressed on with spectrum refarming and radio modernisation.
All operators showed better performance among the poorest-served users and at the cell edge. The worst 5% of download speed outcomes – the 5th percentile, regarded by the analyst as a reasonable proxy for the connections users complain about – improved for all four operators, by 36% for Virgin Media O2, 31% for Vodafone, 22% for Three, and 8% for EE.
Ookla also found that Three subscribers were already benefitting from Vodafone’s legacy coverage, while the latter’s subscribers were enjoying the capacity headroom offered by Three’s network. The analyst said this was “exactly the exchange the merger was engineered to deliver”, with each brand taking advantage of the other parent’s strongest layer through multi-operator core network (MOCN) technology, which allows customers’ devices to connect automatically to the best coverage available and effectively gave access to two networks at no extra cost.
Such a move was seen as reflecting an evolution and tightening integration compared with the earlier multi-operator RAN (Moran) setup, which used just a shared radio but separate carriers.
From an operator perspective, the topline finding was that EE had maintained its leadership in recording median mobile download speeds above 100 Mbps in six cities, up from three compared with the second half of 2025.The operator also shared the UK-wide Text RootScore Award.
EE also recorded the fastest UK-wide aggregate median download speed at 130.3 Mbps, up from 114.1 Mbps in H2 2025, and more than twice as fast as the next-best result (Virgin Media O2’s 54.7 Mbps).
Regarding UK-wide, nation and metropolitan market testing, EE won or shared every UK-wide RootScore Award, including its 26th consecutive UK Overall RootScore Award. This marked more than a decade as the UK’s top overall network.
The BT-owned operator also won or shared 30 of 32 nation-level awards and all 128 Metro Area RootScore Awards, becoming the first operator to win or share every award across all 16 metro markets, and won the Best 5G Experience award.
Three shared the UK-wide Text RootScore Award while earning Text RootScore Awards in all 16 metropolitan markets and earned three nation-level Text RootScore Awards. In major cities, Three registered median download speeds above 50 Mbps in all 16 markets tested, with speeds above 100 Mbps in one (Leicester).
Vodafone increased its Metro Area RootScore Award total from seven in the second half of 2025 to 24 over the course of 2026, the largest increase of any operator. It also improved its high-end speed performance, recording median download speeds above 100 Mbps in five cities, up from two in 2H 2025, and posted the largest city-level 5G availability gain, rising from 38.1% in Coventry in the second half 2025 to 54.6% in the first half of 2026.
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