Three 5G Testing Part Three: St Albans Hospital
So here’s my third attempt to find the ‘Real 5G’ on Three, and it doesn’t seem to be going so well…
That said, it was the best result so far – and EE didn’t even have 5G in the same location, so maybe I’m getting closer to finding the elusive Real 5G speeds of a gigabit and above??
There are reports online of speeds approaching 1Gb in Reading (a test location for Three) and also speeds hitting almost double that in Basildon (see below), so these are now on my ‘hit list’ of places to go next.
How are you getting on with Three’s 5G service so far? Or indeed on 4G now Three is also rolling out more use of its 1400MHz spectrum to reduce congestion.
(Some people have pointed out that nPerf reports all tests as 4G+ when doing 5G tests; this is an issue with the handsets being used where the app does not know it is using 5G. It is not an issue on handsets using Huawei modems (e.g. the Huawei Mate 20 X 5G) and presumably the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 handsets released this year)
Three vs EE network testing video
Speed Test results
The handsets used were the Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 5G on Three, and the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G on EE. Testing was carried out using nPerf.
St Albans Hospital (nPerf)
- Three 5G test one: 431.16 down / 66.78 up / 31ms
- Three 5G test two: 469.40 down / 76.20 up / 65ms
- Three 5G test three: 398.68 down / 75.96 up / 60ms
- Three 5G test four: 436.34 down / 82.52 up / 64ms
- EE 4G test one: 238.40 down / 90.85 up / 39ms
- EE 5G test two: 252.06 down / 56.09 up / 34ms
- EE 5G test three: 220.88 down / 64.98 up / 32ms
St Albans Hospital (Speedtest)
After some quirks in the above test results (starting at a much higher figure and rapidly falling), I did a further test using Ookla’s Speedtest app.
- Three 5G test one: 249.06 down / 50.5 up / 17ms
- Three 5G test two: 69.6 down / 51.2 up / 14ms
- EE 4G test one: 96.90 down / 50.7 up / 28ms
- EE 4G test two: 68.3 down / 52.1 up / 27ms
Here’s the information on the results from a Three 5G site in Basildon: