Europe has dominated key metrics in a new analysis of consumers’ mobile network experience from mobile analytics company Opensignal.
The report, which aims to offer a ‘snapshot’ as we move into the 5G era, examines mobile experience across five areas: 4G availability; video; download speed; upload speed; and latency.
“A look at the leading countries across Opensignal’s metrics shows the pre-eminence of Europe. In a ranking of the ten countries who scored highly across all five of our key metrics, only two were from outside Europe,” said report author, Peter Boyland, Senior Analyst at Opensignal.
Leading on latency
South Korea was the only country to score over 50 Mbps for download speed, with the majority of countries scoring in the 10-20 Mbps range. Opensignal reported a huge range of scores in this metric, with the lowest average score being less than 2 Mbps.
When it comes to latency, only 13 of the 87 countries rated scored under 40 milliseconds (ms), while none scored under 30ms. Six countries in the top ten were from Europe, including Belgium, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Switzerland – all of which posted sub-40ms scores.
Of the top 25 countries who achieved ‘very good’ ratings in video experience, only six were from outside Europe. The top five were Norway, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria and Denmark. Norway and Hungary both scored just over 74 points (out of 100), meaning no country has yet achieved an ‘excellent’ video experience rating.
Four European countries made the 4G Availability top 10 (Norway, Netherlands, Hungary and Sweden – the fewest of any of Opensignal’s award metrics.
The widest variation between upload speed experience scores was at the top end of the table. The gap between number 1 (Denmark) and number 10 (Canada) was over 5Mbps. Below this, there were 40 countries within 5Mbps of Canada’s score.
Early days
Boyland said, “It’s very early days for 5G, but we’re already seeing some notable commercial network launches. 5G won’t just deliver faster speeds. The new technology will provide a blanket of capacity, built using new high-bandwidth, high-frequency spectrum bands that will help mitigate the congestion which we see impacting the mobile network experience across many of our metrics.
“And the upgrades won’t just be felt in speed – 5G will offer great improvements to latency, opening up a whole new world of mobile use cases.”
He added, “But it will take 5G a long time to become as ubiquitous as 4G. This report offers a snapshot of the 4G mobile network experience as we step into the 5G era.”
Opensignal looked at data from January to March 2019, examining 87 countries and comparing their performance across all five key award metrics.