Less than half of London’s offices have good mobile signal
Key Points
- Ookla found 47% of measured indoor floor space in London met its good signal threshold in Q1 2026
- Indoor signal gaps have widened in parts of the capital in recent years
- London respondents still rate their coverage best in the UK, with 19% calling it average or poor
- Yorkshire and the Humber report the weakest indoor coverage at 39%
- London stands to gain around £11 billion a year from better indoor coverage
Just 47% of measured indoor floor space in London met Ookla’s minimum threshold for a good mobile signal in the first quarter of 2026, according to data the network testing firm shared in Freshwave’s Mobile Connectivity ROI Index 2026.
Ookla, which runs the Speedtest app, said the indoor gap has grown worse in parts of the capital over recent years.
“In London, just 47% of measured indoor floor space met our minimum ‘good’ signal threshold in Q1 2026, while gaps have widened in parts of the city over recent years,” said Luke Kehoe, Lead Analyst at Ookla.
The measurements sit alongside a survey of 900 UK executives that Freshwave, which builds shared indoor mobile networks, published in the same report. London respondents rated their own indoor coverage better than anywhere else in the country, with 19% describing their 4G or 5G signal as average or poor.
That compares with 27% across the North of England, 28% in the Midlands and 34% across Scotland and Wales. Yorkshire and the Humber reported the weakest indoor coverage at 39%, followed by the East Midlands at 37%.
London still has the most to gain in cash terms because of the concentration of businesses there. Freshwave put the capital’s potential productivity uplift from better indoor coverage at around £11 billion a year, or 17.8% of the £63 billion UK total, with the South East close behind at 17.4%.
Freshwave attributed indoor signal problems to the building stock itself rather than the mobile networks. Insulated walls and energy-efficient glazing block radio signals, and operators only install their own indoor equipment in the handful of large venues where the numbers work for them, the firm said.
One London-based CIO surveyed for the report described inconsistent network speeds, occasional downtime and unstable connections that cut off access to cloud services.
A London -based COO said the specific challenge for their infrastructure was “proper integration of AI into automation processes and analytical processes”.
Freshwave has a commercial interest in the finding, since it sells the shared small-cell systems that fix exactly this problem. Ookla’s figure comes from crowdsourced signal measurements taken on real devices, while Freshwave’s regional percentages come from respondents’ own ratings of their sites.
