February 23rd 2021

In Tutela’s 2021 Nordics State of Mobile Experience report, which compares user mobile experiences in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, all four countries demonstrated outstanding results, with several ties both between operators and countries for top rankings.

At an inter-regional level, Denmark and Norway both tied for highest Excellent Consistent Quality in the region. Denmark had the highest Core Consistent Quality, while Norway and Finland tied for fastest median download speeds. 

Consistent Quality is a set of metrics that Tutela has developed to objectively evaluate when connections are (or are not) enabling users to do the things they want to on their mobile devices.  There are two sets of thresholds, Excellent and Core. A connection that hits the Excellent threshold is sufficient for use-cases like 1080p video streaming, HD video calling and multiplayer gaming, while a Core connection should be sufficient to stream standard-definition video or handle day-to-day activities like web browsing or uploading photos to social media. The percentages seen in this report represent the percentage of tests for subscribers on a given operator that were above the Excellent or Core thresholds.

The report was released by Tutela Technologies, a global crowdsourced mobile data company, and evaluated over 1.8 million speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between July 1st and December 31st, 2020. 

Per country findings were as follows:

• Denmark:
• By operator in Denmark, TDC dominated in four out five of the metrics tested, including the highest Excellent Consistent Quality with 95.47% of users having a network experience suitable for 1080p video streaming or HD group video calling. 
• TDC also had the highest Core Consistent Quality, and both the fastest median download and upload speed in the country. 
• Telenor made it onto the leaderboard in one category, with the best one-way latency result in Common Coverage Areas across Denmark at 16.4 ms, however with strong competition from the likes of Telia in second place by only 0.1 ms. 

• Finland: 
• Telia took the lead for both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality in Finland, however was no match for DNA in both the download and upload speeds.
• Elisa had the best one-way latency result in the country, however all three Finnish operators finished within milliseconds of each other. 

• Norway:
• Telenor was the dominant operator in three out of five metrics tested, including both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality, and had a clear lead over the competition in the  download speeds with 35.6 Mbps. 
• Telia however took the top spot for the fastest median upload speed with 1.2 Mbps separating the two. Telia also tied with Ice in the latency test for a result of 15.5 ms. 

• Sweden:
• Strong competition was felt in Sweden with each operator making it onto the leaderboard for at least one category each.
• In our download and upload testing, Telia outshone the rest with 35.4 Mbps in the download speed test (more than 7 Mbps faster than second place 3) and 13.9 Mbps in the upload speed test. 
• 3 dominated in the Excellent Consistent Quality metric and in the latency test. For Core Consistent Quality, three operators tied for first place: 3, Tele2 and Telenor. 
  
  

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela said: “The Nordic region continues to impress us with its results. On a global scale, all four countries are in the top 20 for Excellent Consistent Quality which in itself is impressive, but this high quality mobile experience can be seen at the country level and the operator level throughout this report. The competition between each operator is fierce, and as we start to see 5G trickle in we expect that all users in this region will benefit from these operators’ position as global leaders”. 

The full report is available here.