December 14th 2020

Vodafone offers its subscribers the best mobile experience in the Netherlands, according to Tutela’s latest 2020 State of Mobile Report on the BeNeLux region. Vodafone dominated in four of the six metrics tested – although most importantly for customers, Vodafone lead for Excellent Consistent Quality - Tutela’s measures of how often a connection is good enough for two different tiers of applications. Excellent Consistent Quality represents how often a country or operator is good enough for demanding applications like 1080p video streaming, group HD video calls and real time mobile gaming, while Core Consistent Quality represents connections good enough for SD video streaming, social media sharing, and web browsing. Vodafone had 92.0% of connections meet the “Excellent” thresholds, whilst T-Mobile had 97.0% of connections meet the “Core” thresholds.

For this report, Tutela analyzed over 2.8 billion total records taken from real-world smartphone users, including more than 4.7 million speed and latency tests, taken between May 1st and October 31th 2020. 

Other key findings for the Netherlands were: 

• Vodafone had the fastest median download speed at 43.8 Mbps, and the most responsive network with a latency result of 14.2 ms one-way.
• Vodafone also had the highest relative geographic coverage - both overall, and specifically for 4G or 5G connections. Tutela measures this by comparing the observed area covered by a single operator to the total observed area in a country covered by any operator. However, KPN was extremely close behind, separated by just 9 points for total coverage.
• KPN had the top spot for median upload throughput, at 15.0 Mbps. Vodafone only narrowly missed out here by 0.7 Mbps. 

Looking across countries as a whole, the Netherlands offered the best mobile experience to its mobile subscribers, when compared to users in Belgium and Luxembourg. The report found that the country offered its users the highest Excellent Consistent Quality, with 90.6% of tests meeting the “Excellent” thresholds. Belgium placed second by only 2.4% with an Excellent Consistent Quality percentage of 88.2%, and Luxembourg placed third. The Netherlands also lead for median download and upload speeds, while Luxembourg had the best overall one-way latency. 

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela, commented: “Mobile subscribers in the BeNeLux region experience outstandingly good quality connections. Both Vodafone in the Netherlands and POST in Luxembourg really showed their prowess to continuously provide the best mobile experience to its users. While the BeNeLux region is notable for its world-class wireless networks, the purchase and deployment of 5G has been a slower burn than elsewhere in the world. We continue to watch with interest to see how the region, and its individual countries and operators, can retain this lead as we head into the 5G era.” 

The full report is available here.