Network Operators Continue to Invest in Coverage at Major Events

Over the years, I’ve taken a keen interest in how network operators provide coverage at significant events, such as music festivals, particularly the Glastonbury Festival, as well as the British Grand Prix and other large gatherings, including royal weddings and jubilee celebrations.

Dimensioning a temporary network is a huge undertaking in terms of cost and logistics. Still, in a saturated market like the UK, it’s an area where all the major UK networks have increased investment. Overall customer satisfaction and retention are more important than ever, and one bad experience at an event could be the difference between a customer staying with a network operator or switching to a rival at their next renewal. Additionally, data usage at events is consistently rising. For example, Vodafone reported that data traffic at Glastonbury 2025 increased a staggering 25% year-on-year.

Previously, I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about the nuts and bolts of how operators deploy temporary networks through visits to site builds and various events, including Glastonbury Festival in 2024 and 2019, and Wireless Festival in 2023. Furthermore, when attending events, I’ve conducted some rather unscientific tests to try to see how the networks are performing.

This year, I was fortunate enough to be invited back to Glastonbury, and I decided to take a more thorough approach. I got some support from network performance company Streetwave, which equipped me with one of its boxes containing four Samsung Galaxy S24 smartphones, each connected to one of the four UK networks (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Streetwave test rig, containing smartphones connected to all four UK networks

Source: CCS Insight

Throughout the festival, the equipment travelled around the site. I lugged the phones and a large portable power pack around with me, taking the kit to some of the headline performances at the Pyramid Stage, which is arguably the most challenging place for networks to provide consistent performance.

In total, the equipment enabled me to capture data on a whopping 29,754 speed tests on all four networks, shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Number of data samples recorded on the Glastonbury site

Source: Streetwave

So, what did I learn? My general impression was that it was the best network performance that I’ve ever seen at Glastonbury Festival. This was endorsed by the fact that there were significantly fewer complaints from attendees on various forums and social media groups related to the festival than in the past.

Digging into the data, EE, Three and Vodafone all performed well, but users of Virgin Media O2 probably struggled.

Streetwave defines operators with “essential coverage” as offering 1 Mbps download speed, 0.5 Mbps upload speed and less than 100 milliseconds latency. Anything that falls below this threshold is classified as “poor coverage”, including test failures. Interestingly, Vodafone scored the highest essential coverage metric, with 82.2%. This means its customers had the most reliable connection of the four networks, narrowly beating EE by less than two percentage points (80.7%).

Three had by far the best median download speeds, at about 84 Mbps, and EE and Vodafone both delivered a respectable 25 Mbps. Virgin Media O2 languished at 11 Mbps and had the highest level of poor coverage, at 52.3%.

Upload speeds are more important than ever, given attendees’ insatiable desire to share content on social networks and messaging apps like WhatsApp. EE led the way, with a median upload speed of 16 Mbps, and Three and Vodafone had median upload speeds of about 12 Mbps. However, Virgin Media O2 didn’t even reach 1 Mbps, with a median upload speed of just 0.74 Mbps.

The other notable metric was network responsiveness, commonly referred to as latency. This is important for applications that browse the web, as web pages are composed of numerous small files that are requested separately. It’s also crucial for video and voice calling applications, such as WhatsApp and FaceTime, which many festival goers use.

This is a more intangible element to users; they’ll feel like their phone is experiencing delays. It’s a significant challenge when it comes to temporary deployments, and it’s often linked to the quality of the network’s internal data links and the speed at which it can connect to the public internet.

In this metric, a lower figure indicates faster performance. EE came out on top with a median latency of 38 milliseconds, thanks to the extensive investments it has made over the many years it has sponsored the Glastonbury Festival. In contrast, Three achieved 63 milliseconds, Virgin Media O2 recorded 75 milliseconds and Vodafone achieved 78 milliseconds.

Figure 3 shows these metrics based on 29,754 speed tests across all four UK mobile networks, colour-coded from best to worst performance.

Figure 3. Key performance metrics recorded at the Glastonbury Festival

Source: Streetwave

As the lead sponsor, Vodafone certainly committed this year, once again upgrading its coverage with an impressive deployment of 11 temporary cells on wheels, referred to as COWs. These were supplemented by 17 small cells, each with 4G and 5G technology. This added additional capacity in the busiest areas such as Silver Hayes and the Pyramid Stage. Other network operators also deployed numerous temporary sites to support the event.

One caveat I need to include is that I took the test equipment to the Pyramid Stage on Sunday 29 June, to coincide with some of the biggest performances of the festival. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to connect to the EE network, despite trying multiple devices. This slightly skewed the results and was disappointing as I was keen to get like-for-like comparisons for all the networks at one of the busiest venues and periods during the event.

The bottom line is that, except for Virgin Media O2, all the networks provided remarkable quality of service at a one-off event that needed to be dimensioned for the kind of capacity required in a capital city. To pull that off in a field in Somerset is mind-blowing.

Furthermore, I expect coverage will continue to improve as operators upgrade their temporary network infrastructure. Also, the integration of Vodafone and Three in the UK presents a fantastic opportunity, given the spectrum holdings of the combined entity. It’ll be viable to offer two 5G channels of 100 MHz spectrum, using the combined holdings of Three and Vodafone, providing a considerable competitive advantage.

With Glastonbury taking a break next year, all eyes will be on 2027, where we might even see the first deployment of millimetre-wave technology, similar to how Glastonbury 2019 was used as a showcase for 5G, given that spectrum auctions are scheduled for October 2025. That will present its own challenges — not least regarding device compatibility — but it’ll undoubtedly provide an interesting new angle for me.