July 1st 2020

Tigo consistently offered the best mobile experience to its customers, according to Tutela’s new 2020 State of Mobile Report in Colombia, which was released today. The report found that the operator offered its users the highest Excellent Consistent Quality performance in the country, with 62.4% 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. Meanwhile, Claro had the highest median download throughput at 10.1 Mbps. 

Tigo also had the best one-way latency result, a measure of the responsiveness of a network at 50.9 ms, while Movistar had the highest Core Consistent Quality (a measure of network performance for a range of use cases such as standard-definition video streaming, web browsing, email use, and photo-sharing apps) at 92.9%, and Avantel had the fastest median upload speed at 8.4 Mbps.

• Colombia’s networks proved incredibly competitive, with all four national providers appearing on the leaderboard in at least one category Tigo had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality percentage and the best one-way latency result in Colombia, while Claro took the award for fastest median download speed, and Avantal lead for median upload speed.
• Movistar had the highest Core Consistent Quality percentage in the country at 92.9%, despite its third place ranking in the Excellent Consistent Quality.
• Avantel SIM users demonstrate more time on 4G networks, with the other three providers showing less than 70% of time on 4G technology. However, while 4G connections usually outperform 3G ones, it is notable that Avantel still places last for download speed.

Leandro Demarchi, Sales Director for Tutela in LATAM and Southern Europe, said: “All four operators in Colombia proved to be very competitive against one another, meaning that mobile users in Colombia, especially those in cities where all four operators operate, likely have a significant choice of providers. There may not have been a dominant winner in Colombia, with Tigo being the only operator to take two wins out of the five metrics tested, the close competition from the likes of Movistar and Claro is reassuring that the most competitive offerings are on hand to its users. We look forward to seeing progress in Colombia and the deployment of 5G later this year”.

Tutela measures network quality based on the real-world experience of actual network subscribers, inclusive of occasions when a network or plan may be throttled or congested, or when a subscriber is roaming onto another operator’s network. As a result, this report is representative of the mobile experience of a variety of real-world users delivered by each network provider, not the best-case performance of the network itself.

The report evaluated 1 billion records in Common Coverage Areas across Colombia, including more than 14 million speed tests and 212 million latency tests, collected between December 1, 2019 and May 31, 2020.

The full report is available online here.