Mobile data customer experience benchmarked in Latvia, Estonia, Denmark. All leading operators included: TeliaSonera, Telenor, TDC, Tre, Elisa, Tele2, Bite, LMT. Which one offers the best data services?
Traditionally mobile network benchmarks and drive test campaigns focus heavily on network KPIs such as throughput and coverage. In mobile business today, the experienced service quality plays a significant role as a means of competitive differentiation. Most importantly, the subscribers desire smooth smartphone application experience.
The measurements of this customer experience benchmark consisted of country-wide drive test campaigns and stationary hot-spot testing in selected locations.
- The drive tests focused on assessing data capacity and voice call service quality.
- The stationary tests involved testing of popular smartphone applications: WWW browsing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Dropbox.
Key Results
Best FTP data download results were achieved in TDC Denmark network, over 45 Mbps on average over the whole country, EMT Estonia follow close with 44 Mbps. Rest of the operators in Latvia, Denmark and Estonia fall in 20-30 Mbps region, except for Tele2 Latvia* which is somewhat behind the others with 11 Mbps. The relatively high data rates are mostly attributed to country-wide 4G LTE network deployments in the region.
WWW Page Waiting Time represents the time between user requesting a web page and completing the content download. Tests showed that LMT Latvia obtained the fastest web browsing results, followed closely by TDC Denmark. TDC and LMT performed rather well in other application tests too.
Averaging the time-to-content results of Web browsing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, shows that TDC Denmark offers the fastest response times on average. LMT Latvia follows very close.
Looking at the results on per country basis (that is averaging over all operators within a given country), the results indicate that performance-wise the measured mobile markets are rather close to each other. The average application response times of all measured countries are within half a second margin.
Independent Evaluation
Omnitele conducted the benchmarks independently and on its own cost with in-house project team. In order to achieve independent and objective view, we sourced the SIM cards directly through operator shops – like real subscribers do. The test routes and indoor/outdoor test locations were selected by Omnitele in blind-test fashion, preferring locations with high likelihood of end-user service usage. The test cases were selected and configured as per expected end-user behaviour.
Further information
For further information on the detailed results, methodology and country-specific details, please refer to the respective public summary reports, links available in the full article with tables & figures: http://www.omnitele.com/2015/mobile-data-customer-experience-in-nordics-baltics/
