July 9th 2020

Austria consistently offered the best mobile experience to its mobile subscribers, when compared to users in Switzerland and Germany, according to Tutela’s latest 2020 State of Mobile Report on the DACH region. The report found that the country offered its users the highest Excellent Consistent Quality, with 88.0% of tests meeting the “Excellent” thresholds that Tutela uses to represent a group of higher-intensity use cases including 1080p video streaming, HD video calls or mobile gaming. Within the country itself, 3 offered its users the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 89.0%, narrowly beating out A1 and Magenta. 

Tutela has evaluated 7.4 billion records in Common Coverage Areas across the DACH region, including more than 83 million speed tests and 1.02 billion latency tests, collected between October 1st 2019 and March 31st 2020.  

After Austria, Switzerland placed second by only 0.4% for an Excellent Consistent Quality percentage of 87.6%, and Germany placed third for an Excellent Consistent Quality of 78.5%,  9.5% behind Austria. This was despite Switzerland having the fastest overall median download speed at 5.3 Mbps faster than Austria. 

Austria:

Overall, Austria had the highest Excellent and Core Consistent Quality in the region. By operator, A1 dominated in the country, winning four of the five metrics tested, missing out on having the highest Excellent Consistent Quality with the award going to 3 at 89.0%. A1 had the fastest median download speed in the country at 28.5 Mbps, and the fastest median upload speed at 11.8 Mbps. For median latency, A1 had the best one-way result at 15.2 ms. 

Germany:

For Germany, Telekom put on an impressive performance, winning four of the five metrics tested including the highest Excellent and Core Consistent Quality in the country, but lost out to O2 on latency, with the best one-way result at 14.8 ms. Telekom had the fastest median download speed in the country with 17.2 Mbps, and the fastest median upload speed at 7.8 Mbps. 

Switzerland:

Switzerland took out the top spot for both fastest download speed at 30.0 Mbps and upload speed at 11.8 Mbps, when compared to Austria and Germany. Switzerland also had the best one-way latency result at 13.5 ms. 

Swisscom in Switzerland dominated in four of the metrics tested including Excellent and Core Consistent Quality. However, Sunrise won the award for best latency result. 

• Latency performance was excellent across all three countries, with no operator recording a one-way latency higher than 20 milliseconds. The recent surge in working from home — not to mention online video gaming — has shown the necessity of a responsive network for real-time applications like video chatting, and DACH operators are well suited to respond to this demand.
• Germany’s users are spending more time on 4G than in previous years, however still significantly less than users in other parts of the DACH region – and this shows in the results in almost every KPI, where Germany places in third behind Austria and Switzerland.

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela said: “Mobile subscribers across the DACH region, particularly Austria and Switzerland, experience extremely good and consistent connections. As the focus moves heavily onto 5G deployment, it is encouraging that users can expect to have consistent, high quality, mobile experiences even as infrastructure and technology is improved. This will be critical to maintain over the year ahead, particularly as some spectrum auctions are delayed, which may present a roadblock on the path to 5G excellence.”

The full report is available online here.