In addition to performing the best in our mobile network speed tests, TIM ranked highest in our overall mobile network performance in Italy, based on a combination of 5 quality measurements: network download and upload speed, latency, jitter and packet loss.

Vodafone suffers from high packet loss

Despite good performance in most categories, Vodafone Italy performed very poorly on packet loss, with an average of over 10% and over 4% on 3G and 4G networks in Italy, respectively, significantly higher than the other Italian mobile network operators. 

This could result in the poor performance of applications such as Skype or FaceTime. High packet loss on mobile data networks can be caused by issues such as high network congestion, or use of microwave rather than fibre infrastructure connectivity to cell tower antennas.

About our testing

Tutela tests mobile networks by crowdsourcing anonymous sensor data from hundreds of millions of Android and iOS mobile users across the world. This enables us to collect billions of measurements every day and gain a real-world understanding of the mobile experience that mobile users are getting - not just in major towns & cities, but in all parts of the world.

Our testing methodology is designed to simulate typical user mobile behaviour, such as downloading a photograph or web page, rather than measuring the maximum performance, such as the peak download speed during a very large file transfer (which very few users will achieve) so that we can understand a typical user's experience.