September 24th 2020

Norway leads the way in Tutela’s new 2020 Global Mobile Experience Report, with the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 89.6%. Excellent Consistent Quality is Tutela’s way to measure the best mobile experience - looking at how often a user’s connection is good enough for demanding applications such as 1080p video streaming, real-time mobile gaming, and HD video calling. 

Meanwhile, Denmark’s subscribers had the best core mobile experience in the world, measured using Tutela’s Core Consistent Quality metric. This examines the percentage of connections suitable for many day-to-day activities, such as SD video streaming, social media sharing, and web browsing. Denmark’s subscribers had 97.5% of connections meeting these thresholds.

Key findings:

• The Nordic countries frequently outperform any other region, leading the way for mobile experience in both Europe and the wider world. Norway places first for Excellent Consistent Quality, while Denmark and Sweden rank first and second for Core Consistent Quality
• Individual countries that excelled in their region were Singapore and South Korea in Asia, Australia and New Zealand in Oceania, Canada in North America and Uruguay in South America
• Despite the marketing hype around faster speeds, above a point faster speeds deliver little in terms of network experience improvement. Switzerland, who had the fastest median download speeds, was ninth when it came to Excellent Consistent Quality – beaten by countries with download speeds that were up to 19% slower

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela commented: “As we head into the 5G era the results highlight a critical message - that faster download speeds don’t always equal a better mobile experience. 5G will no doubt usher in a new raft of mobile applications and be pivotal in adding extra capacity and reliability to existing networks. However, for the current activities mobile subscribers expect from their connections – video streaming, video calling, web browsing and mobile gaming – many countries already offer outstanding service on existing 4G infrastructure. That said, there is room for improvement across the board, particularly when it comes to reliably providing a connection good enough for more intensive activities like HD video calling or 1080p video which require consistent, high performing connections.”

The full report is available here.