December 2019

Australia and New Zealand continue to make waves in the telecom industry with both countries taking interest in implementing technologies with 5G at the helm. Recently, Spark New Zealand started a live 5G trial for the sailing team, Emirates New Zealand, to test out on the Auckland Harbour waters, enabling the team to send back key data in real-time to their engineers and designers. In Australia, Telstra has announced steps to turn off its 3G network in June 2024 to better utilise spectrum for 5G services. 

In Tutela’s State of Mobile Networks report for Australia and New Zealand, Australia dominated at a country level in all metrics tested. Telstra was the top operator for Australia, whilst in New Zealand, 2degrees outperformed the other operators in four out of the five metrics tested despite being a relatively new entrant. 

To see how the nationwide carriers on the 3G and 4G networks performed in the top 5 most populated cities of Australia and top 5 most populated cities of New Zealand, Tutela has collected and analyzed over 10 million speed tests and 133 million latency tests between April 1st and September 30th 2019.

Key findings:

• Adelaide is the top city in Tutela’s testing, with the highest overall Excellent Consistent Quality percentage of 88.8%. Adelaide also has the fastest median download speed at 26.8 Mbps
  
  
• Telstra continues its nationwide winning streak, and is the top operator in all 5 Australian cities for Excellent Consistent Quality
  
  
• 2degrees outperforms other operators in four of the five cities, with Wellington the only city in New Zealand to have Spark as its top operator
  
  
• Sydney, the most populated city in Australia, comes in last place for Australia and 5th overall with an Excellent Consistent Quality percentage of 86.1% 
  
  
• Tauranga comes in last place overall with an Excellent Consistent Quality percentage of 77.2%, 11.6% behind Adelaide, and the slowest median download speed at 13.1 Mbps.

Jump to individual city results

Consistent Quality 

To more objectively evaluate when networks are (and are not) enabling users to do those things, Tutela has developed a standard called consistent quality. Simply put, it’s two sets of thresholds, called Excellent and Core. If a connection hits the Excellent standard, it’s sufficient for the most demanding mobile use-cases, like HD group video calling or 1080p video streaming.  A Core connection is good enough for SD video streaming, web browsing, emails, and VOIP calling, but users are more likely to experience delays or buffering when trying to use more demanding apps. Tutela bases the threshold values on the minimum performance requirements published by popular apps. We most recently updated our Consistent Quality threshold on September 1st, 2019.

Tutela’s consistent quality metric, as used in our reports, simply measures the percentage of time that users can hit the thresholds. The higher the number, the more often users have a Core or Excellent quality connection.

Excellent Quality

Core Quality