“The Olympics and Paralympics have brought a lot of benefits to London and it is really refreshing to see that mobile hotspots have been made more readily available and hopefully will continue to be rolled out and improved after the games,” says Nathan Pearce, Product Manager EMEA F5 Networks.
The research, was conducted by F5 Networks across a four week period, involved a Wi-Fi team visiting twelve of the busiest London Games hotspots, including Wembley, Stratford, Hyde Park and Stratford[1] to test both Wi-Fi hotspots and 3G download speeds before and during the Games to establish how they performed under the pressure of additional traffic from Olympics visitors.
The results highlighted that Wi-Fi hotspots reached download speeds of up to 9.33 Mb/s and 3G speeds of 0.64 Mb/s, which was up from the average speed of 7.81 Mb/s for Wi-Fi and 0.41Mb/s for 3G just two weeks prior to the opening ceremony of the games.
“Before the games most people had written the operators off, expecting them to crumble under the pressure of additional traffic, added Pearce. “However, these findings clearly show that London passed yet another big test during the games, improving network speeds across nine of the twelve sites tested.
“Hopefully this is a sign of things to come in the mobile space and something that operators continue to build on to service the ever-growing demand for data on the go.”
As remote working and accessing data hungry applications becomes more and more popular across the country the research shows that it is important that hotspots continue to develop across not only London but the rest of the United Kingdom as well.
Pearce concludes: “Ensuring a reliable mobile internet service, be it Wi-Fi or 3G should be operators’ main focus over the coming months. With Everything Everywhere planning to roll out the first 4G networks in England this year, a way for other mobile operators to keep pace is to optimise their existing networks to make sure content flows across them in the best possible fashion. By doing this operators will also ensure that when it comes to switching to a 4G environment they already have an optimised network.
“Whilst it is great to see that the Olympics has spurred operators on to improve their current service, hopefully they won’t pull the plug now the Olympics and Paralympics party is over.”