In our annual benchmark report for Italy, we have evaluated over 4.2 million speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between May and October 2021.
The Italian telecoms industry has been through great change over the last year, and it has recently shown its prowess on a global scale when it comes to providing the best overall mobile experience it can to its mobile users. In Tutela’s latest Global State of Mobile Experience report for 2021, Italy placed 27th out of the top 30 countries with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 72.2%.
In October, Italian regulator Agcom reported that WindTre is leading the mobile market with a market share of 27%, followed by TIM at 26%, Vodafone at 23.5%, and Iliad, only celebrating its third anniversary, at 10.1%.
In November, the Italian government announced that 2 billion will be invested to extend and upgrade 5G networks by 2026, with the overall plan being that all areas of Italy, including remote areas, will have access to the newest network at speeds of at least 150Mbps. While this new network is the way forward, in order to continue making 5G accessible for all, operators also need to factor in affordability for all. In May this year, Iliad Italia for example, unveiled its latest mobile data plan that will include 120 GB of 5G data for EUR 9.99 a month.
And as operators begin to ramp up their 5G implementation, there is less need for older technologies such as 3G. TIM recently announced that it will gradually decommission its 3G network starting April 2022 in order to free up spectrum for 4G-LTE, while Vodafone was ahead of the rest back in January 2021 and has officially switched off 3G. Vodafone Italia has also reported that it will be providing 5G to at least 50-60 cities across the country by the end of this year.
Report statistics
Date range: 1 May 2021 - 31 October 2021
Download & response tests = 4.2 million Total measurements = 249 million
Operators
Iliad TIM Vodafone Wind Tre
Report statistics
Key findings
Vodafone provides best overall mobile experience Vodafone Italy is providing its mobile users the best mobile experience in the country, based on the operator having the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 77.2%, and statistically tied for first place with Iliad for Core Consistent Quality.
Vodafone has best 4G/5G coverage, TIM for total coverage in Italy While Vodafone had the greatest 4G/5G coverage in Italy at 560 out of 1000, the operator statistically tied for second place along with Wind Tre for total coverage at 579 out of 1000. TIM took first place for total coverage with 587.
Iliad a strong contender in all metrics, had second highest Video Experience Score Iliad had the highest Core Consistent Quality along with Vodafone, and had the second highest Video Experience Score in the country at 3.82, only 0.2 behind Vodafone.
Mobile experience awards
Discover the top performing operators in our mobile experience results table.
The contents of this report and the awards shown above are copyright Tutela; organizations may republish the awards and results above for editorial purposes; non-commercial uses and on unsponsored social media posts. For all other uses, please contact awards@tutela.com.
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
Coverage Score - the relative geographic coverage of an operator, compared with other operators, scored out of 1000 (please note that the score is not a representation of the percentage geographic coverage in a country)
Video experience - determined based on a range of video specific KPIs including stall rate, resolution and buffering time
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 methodologyhere.
Consistent Quality
Consistent Quality
In Common Coverage Areas across Italy, Vodafone had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality with 77.2% of connections good enough for demanding applications like 1080p video streaming, HD group video calling, and real time mobile gaming. With a difference of only 2.6%, TIM had the second highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 74.6%, while Iliad and Wind Tre statistically tied for third place with an Excellent Consistent Quality just over 73.0%.
For Core Consistent Quality, Tutela’s metric for when a mobile connection meets the requirements for use-cases like SD video streaming, social media sharing and web browsing, both Iliad and Vodafone statistically tied for first place and narrowly missed out on reaching the 90% threshold with a Core Consistent Quality of 89.4%. TIM was in third place with a Core Consistent Quality of 89.1%, while Wind Tre was in fourth at 86.0%.
Vodafone had the greatest 4G/5G coverage with a score of 560 while it statistically tied with Wind Tre for second place in the total coverage category with a score of 579. A difference of just 19 points between 4G/5G and total coverage shows that the majority of subscribers on Vodafone’s network are using the most upgraded technology as opposed to older 3G.
While TIM had the second greatest 4G/5G coverage score of 554, it led in the total coverage category, narrowly outperforming Vodafone by 8 points with a score of 587. Wind Tre placed third with a 4G/5G score of 541 and statistically tied for second place with a total coverage score of 579. Having a difference of 32 points between the two, Iliad ranked fourth with a 4G/5G coverage score of 530 and a total coverage score of 562.
The largest difference between 4G/5G coverage and total coverage in Italy stands at just 38 points for Wind Tre. A small difference such as this indicates that all the operators in the country are slowly moving away from more legacy technologies and beginning 3G shutdown initiatives. Vodafone began switching off its 3G network early this year, while TIM is planning to shut down its 3G network in 2022.
In Tutela’s newest metric, Video Experience Score, which was created to measure the quality of experience subscribers are getting while video streaming, the results for all operators were extremely close. Vodafone again won with the highest Video Experience Score of 3.84 with Iliad narrowly missing first place at 3.82. TIM came in third with a Video Experience Score of 3.78 followed by Wind Tre in fourth place at 3.76.
The table below shows a breakdown of individual KPIs for each operator.
Iliad
TIM
Vodafone
Wind Tre
Download median
20.1 Mbps +/- 0.04 Mbps
22.9Mbps +/- 0.06 Mbps
26.8 Mbps +/- 0.06 Mbps
23.2 Mbps +/- 0.04 Mbps
Download % above 5 Mbps
90.8%
88.9%
92.9%
89.8%
Upload median
6.8 Mbps +/- 0.02 Mbps
12.3 Mbps +/- 0.03 Mbps
9.8 Mbps +/- 0.03 Mbps
8.1 Mbps +/- 0.01 Mbps
Upload % above 1.5 Mbps
90.3%
93.3%
95.4%
94.1%
Latency % below 50 ms
98.3%
99.7%
99.9%
99.7%
Jitter % below 12 ms
97.6%
97.1%
97.8%
96.1%
Packet discard % below 1%
94.0%
95.8%
92.6%
96.7%
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