Having a smartphone with access to all the latest features and apps is all well and good, however, a great many of the features that make a smartphone so useful in the real world rely on mobile internet. It appears that mobile phone provider O2 has come out on top in the latest study into mobile broadband speeds...

The latest study has been undertaken by Ofcom, who unearthed a number of interesting revelations for the various leading mobile phone providers, some of which will be more welcome than others.

Both Orange and T-Mobile will be forced to double their efforts, as it was revealed that their latest “Everything Everywhere” venture suffers from speeds that are slower than other leading providers, including Three, O2 and Vodafone.

Ofcom's testing of the different providers has been noted as incredibly thorough and comprehensive, incorporating data from a whopping 4.2 million unique speed tests; it has managed to reveal several key differences with the services provided by the various networks.

One of its most interesting findings showed that O2 was faster than all other network operators during the peak evening period of 8-10pm. O2 also managed to notch up another victory over web page download tests; they were faster than the other top four operators in downloading the full HTML (with the exception of images) of some of the United Kingdom's most popular web sites.

The testing will come as unwelcome news to some of the operators, as it serves to highlight that there is clearly still big differences in the quality of services offered by the various leading providers. Smartphone users around the UK will undoubtedly be using the newly available information to influence their choice of network provider.

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