MedUX recently released its 2025 benchmark report on 5G performance across 15 European cities, revealing that Porto and Stockholm share the top spot in Europe for overall Quality of Experience (QoE), scoring 4.78 out of 5, respectively. Lisbon and Copenhagen follow behind closely.
The research comes from drive tests conducted during Q4 2024 across 15 major cities in 11 European cities, covering 60 million people. The drive tests cars covered more than 5,500km to understand how mobile operators are deploying and covering European cities with 5G services.
Porto and Stockholm showcased the best data and OTT experience, registering the lowest gaming average jitter of 10ms and delivers fast Cloud service performance. Porto co-leads with Lisbon in providing the best valud for speed, ensuring peak speeds exceeding 800Mbps in the fastest 10% of sessions. Porto also co-leads with Copenhagen in 5G availability, achieving an 86.54% registration rate and maintains 100% connectivity time in 5G mid-band n78.
Research highlights Stockholm as co-best overall 5G only QoE, excelling in video streaming, with a 95% rate of 4K playback time and 5G upload speeds, achieving a typical speed above 116Mbps. The city also shares the top spot with Porto for data and OTT experience. Stockholm boasts top time-to-content performance with fast web page loading times of less than 1 second. Furthermore, the Swedish capital leads in web browsing and file transferring and co-leads in social media experience.
Lisbon secures the third position in overall QoE and stands out as the most reliable service, with 99.63% successful Internet sessions. The city also boasts the fastest 5G download speed, reaching 1.9 Gbps, ensuring a superior experience for data-intensive applications. Additionally, Lisbon co-leads with Porto in value for speed and social media experience. Meanwhile, Copenhagen leads in 5G availability with 86.99% technology registration rate, ensuring widespread access to 5G services.
Brussels noticeably trails the leading cities in overall 5G QoE. The report reveals that Brussels’ performance is affected by lower 5G availability and slower speeds. Additionally, its overall reliability and streaming services needs improvement. In the meantime, London ranks last in overall mobile experience, mirroring the 2024 findings. The report reveals subpar 5G availability, slow speeds, and a clear need for enhanced reliability across multiple services.
“This report underscores the importance of a holistic approach to 5G quality. While coverage and speed remain key factors, high-quality 5G Connectivity and consistent performance across all services and applications are crucial for delivering a truly superior user experience,” said Rafael González, SVP EMEA, MedUX. “Our findings provide valuable insights for operators wanting to optimise their networks and meet the evolving needs of their customers in the 5G era.
“Our field measurements confirm that, on average, in major European cities, end-users are connected 25% of the time simply to 4G. Furthermore, of the remaining 75% connected to 5G, 10% of deployments lack mid-band spectrum. This reality dampens the transformative potential of 5G and calls for urgent policy and investment shifts toward dedicated high-quality 5G deployments for enhanced experience and reliability. Addressing these issues is crucial for Europe to ensure universal 5G coverage across all urban areas by 2025 and to fully leverage the benefits of 5G technology.”
There’s plenty of other editorial on our sister site, Electronic Specifier! Or you can always join in the conversation by commenting below or visiting our LinkedIn page.
