Research reveals mobile broadband speeds in UK airports

For UK firms with teams traveling on company business, fast and reliable mobile broadband services are essential.

Enabling colleagues to keep communicating, carrying out their role and accessing the data they need, high-quality mobile broadband is invaluable.

Recently, Ookla, the broadband connection testing expert, supplied new figures on Wi-Fi and 4G and 5G mobile data performance at major travel hubs around the world, including two of the UK’s busiest airports – London Heathrow (LHR) and London Gatwick (LGW).

Renowned for its Speedtest.net online performance service, used by thousands of internet users worldwide, Ookla recorded and provided upload and download speeds for mobile broadband and Wi-Fi. It also supplied statistics on latency.

Latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel from a sender to a receiver, or the delay between a user action and a response. A serious connectivity issue, network latency can be caused by many factors, and can dramatically impact internet experience.

The report found that for Wi-Fi, Heathrow Airport had an average download speed of 58.44 megabytes per second, and an upload speed of 68.06 megabytes per second, with a latency of 6.43 milliseconds. Average mobile download speeds were recorded at 38.12 megabytes per second, upload speeds at 7.02 megabytes per second and latency at 50.1 milliseconds.

Gatwick Airport Wi-Fi services had a mean download speed of 49.46 megabytes per second, and upload speeds of 49.84megabytes per second, with latency at 11.71 milliseconds.

For mobile broadband, Gatwick had an average download speed of 86.82 megabytes per second, an upload speed of 9.83 megabytes per second and latency of 43.49 milliseconds.