With London failing to meet the connectivity needs of a busy global city, local government has identified a set of council-led initiatives to boost mobile coverage and performance
A new report provides a comprehensive picture of Londoners’ experience of using mobile services
On 15 October 2026, Sir Sadiq Khan (Mayor, London) announced new action to support the improvement of mobile connectivity across the city. Khan is seeking to build on the 2017 Connected London programme, which has seen a £30m investment into London’s fibre infrastructure as well as support for Boldyn Networks’ ongoing work to deliver 4G/5G coverage along the Tube network. The announced action comes alongside (and effectively responds to) a report from the Greater London Authority (GLA) and network testing firm Ookla, which used crowdsourced data to show where London’s mobile connectivity is currently lacking. The report states that the quality of a consumer’s mobile experience depends on which network they use and where they use it, with no single network the best everywhere. It also highlights a “doughnut hole” of weak performance in inner North and East London, with the boroughs of Camden, Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets recording weaker signal strengths than the City of London, Kensington and Chelsea, Newham, Lambeth, and Hammersmith and Fulham.
The Capital Connectivity Standard for London exceeds Ofcom’s expectations for good network performance
The report also introduces the Capital Connectivity Standard (CCS), a benchmark to assess whether mobile performance meets the needs of a busy global city. The standard builds on Ofcom’s “Successful” baseline (5Mbps download and 1.5Mbps upload speeds) to provide a more demanding level of connectivity for London of 25Mbps download and 8Mbps upload speeds. The report goes further to suggest a number of stronger adaptations to Ofcom’s national approach for measuring mobile coverage (see Table).
The Mayor is encouraging boroughs to take a more hands-on approach to improving mobile connectivity
Alongside the CCS, the Mayor announced the London Mobile Connectivity Framework, which sets out the following 10 actions for boroughs to implement to support the improvement of mobile connectivity locally:
Appoint a mobile connectivity lead to improve coordination across planning, highways, housing, regeneration and estate teams;
Collaborate across teams to establish clear routes between those likely to influence connectivity outcomes;
Create a simple register of public assets (e.g. rooftops, street furniture) that could be used for network deployment;
Review planning performance, so boroughs reconsider if past refusals of telecoms infrastructure were valid;
Establish regular operator engagement on investment plans, so boroughs make sure they align with their own growth and infrastructure programmes;
Assess developments through a connectivity lens, so that boroughs can ask how connectivity has been considered, and what existing infrastructure may be affected in these developments;
Streamline access to rooftop assets as consistent processes and documentation may reduce administrative burden and speed up the deployments;
Review infrastructure at risk of displacement to ensure connectivity is considered before infrastructure is displaced by redevelopment;
Include connectivity in growth and regeneration programmes as doing so earlier is usually easier and cheaper than addressing issues later; and
Report on performance annually using local connectivity data provided by the GLA, comparing progress to the actions in the framework.
Some of these actions are more material than others. The suggestions for more regular operator engagement and for boroughs to create an asset register of all public buildings and land that may be suitable for network deployments are particularly useful.
The new mobile coverage mapping tool is now more accurate than Ofcom’s
The Mayor’s announcement included a new coverage map published by the GLA for consumers to check mobile performance across the city. While similar to Ofcom’s Map Your Mobile tool, the GLA’s Interactive London Mobile Connectivity Map map goes further to give a more accurate view of mobile performance in a number of ways, most notably by relying solely on crowdsourced data rather than operator predictions. It more clearly shows differences in quality with darker shaded colours corresponding to faster upload and download speeds, lower latency and stronger signal, rather than only relying on one “Successful” classification for connectivity. The GLA’s data also takes into account peak and off-peak times as well as how performance changes from weekdays to weekends, which is a level of specificity Ofcom has not yet implemented into its own tool.
