Colombia State of Mobile Experience 2022

Introduction

In our new benchmark report for Colombia, we have evaluated 3.3 million speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between December 2021 and May 2022.

The past two years of a world battling a pandemic have been a testimony to the growing dependence of people and businesses alike on telecoms services. According to a press release published by Communications Regulation Commission (CRC) in Colombia, mobile internet connections reached 38 million by December 2021 — a 16.8% increase from December 2020. 28.9 million of these were 4G connections. Keeping up with demand of this scale needs deliberate efforts and several such initiatives were undertaken in the country by regulators and operators alike.

The biggest disruption that the Colombian mobile market has seen recently is the launch of a new entrant — WOM Colombia. Since the operator’s launch in April 2021, WOM claims to have gained 2 million mobile subscriptions in the country and deployed 3,832 cell sites. As our report demonstrates, the operator has become a dominant player for mobile network consistency as it leads in both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality metrics. A new entrant provides more choices to the customers encouraging competition among operators to improve subscriber experience.

Additionally, Claro announced that it plans to complete its 2G network shutdown by December 2022 and 2G services will not be available to its users as of January 1, 2023. This freeing up of spectrum will be used for network modernization and increased efforts on 4G and in future, for 5G. Colombia is making slow progress when it comes to 5G deployment. While the timeline for a 5G spectrum auction has not been announced yet, The Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC) of Colombia released a public consultation and support document for 5G development. The purpose of this consultation is to share its results with the public and the document includes topics such as spectrum allocation, network modernization etc.

Key findings

WOM has the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in Colombia
WOM took the top spot for Excellent Consistent Quality in Colombia with a score of 54.6%. This means that 54.6% of users’ tests in Colombia met the minimum thresholds for demanding applications, such as watching HD video and completing group video conference calls. WOM was followed by Movistar, Tigo and Claro in second, third and fourth place respectively with scores in the range of 40.6%-42.7%.
WOM takes the lead for Core Consistent Quality in the country
Results for Core Consistent Quality saw a similar pattern when it comes to operator rankings with WOM in the lead and a Core Consistent Quality score of 75.5%. Core Consistent Quality measures the percentage of users’ tests that meet the minimum thresholds for less demanding applications such as web browsing and watching SD video. Movistar came in second with a score of 71.8%, followed by Tigo at 71.3% and Claro in fourth place at 64.9%.

Understanding this report

This report encompasses the following experience KPIs:

Excellent Consistent Quality - the percentage of the time that a network met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for HD video, group video conference calls and gaming
Core Consistent Quality - the percentage of the time that a network met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls and web browsing

To ensure a fair comparison between operator performance, Tutela limits the results used in our comparisons to those collected within Common Coverage Areas.

Learn more about our benchmarking methodology here.

Consistent Quality

WOM had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality with 54.6% of connections good enough for demanding applications like 1080p video streaming, HD group video calling and real time mobile gaming in Common Coverage Areas across Colombia. Trailing by 11.9 percentage points, Movistar came in second with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 42.7%. Tigo was close behind at 41.7% while Claro placed fourth with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 40.6% — a lag of 14 percentage points behind the winner WOM.

With a score of 75.5%, WOM took the lead for Core Consistent Quality, Tutela’s metric that represents the percentage of the time that our users’ average experience met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls and web browsing. Movistar placed second, missing the top spot by a mere 3.7 percentage points. Tigo was extremely close to Movistar with a score of 71.3%. Claro on the other hand was further behind at 64.9%, trailing first placed WOM by 10.6 percentage points.

Download overall image

	Claro	Movistar	Tigo	WOM
Download % above 5 Mbps	71.5%	69.8%	74.2%	77.6%
Upload % above 1.5 Mbps	87.8%	87.8%	94.1%	90.8%
Latency % below 50 ms	95.6%	91.4%	97.7%	95.2%
Jitter % below 12 ms	96.0%	91.6%	90.2%	96.8%
Packet discard % below 1%	73.9%	80.9%	69.2%	82.1%

Colombia

Introduction

Report statistics

Operators

Key findings

Mobile Experience Awards

Understanding this report

Consistent Quality

Consistent Quality

KPI performance

Discover more insights for Colombia