Intestingly (I think) the UK was very slow in adopting 3G, but 4G has come a lot more quickly and I believe we're one of the countries with the higher average 4G speeds now.

That's not true at all. 3UK had one of the world's first operational 3G services.

4G LTE rollout in the UK was and is painfully slow. The only good thing was that a lot of networks had very good coverage of HSPA+ and DC-HSPDA which is pretty close to LTE responsiveness in day to day use.

From a technical perspective, yes the UK had early 3G, however uptake was slow compared to 4g.

Iirc one of the reasons the US has poor 4g is because the telcos there branded HSDPA as 4g there while it was still branded as 3g in Europe.

So when real 4g (LTE) arrived, European providers had more incentive to roll out for marketing reasons.

This might be half remembered bs though.