Opensignal has analyzed the mobile experience of smartphone users who changed mobile network operators in Germany. We found that our users who changed their mobile service provider on average had a worse mobile experience before they switched compared to the typical experience on their original network. Moreover, out of all our users that we have seen switching mobile operators, our users who left O2 and Vodafone on average had a better experience on their new mobile network, while our users who left Telekom did not see any significant difference to their mobile experience on their new network.
Opensignal analyzed the mobile experience of our smartphone users in Germany who changed their mobile network service provider (‘Leavers’) in the second half of 2020. We looked at those users’ mobile experience during the 30 days before they made the change, and compared that against the average experience on their network during the full period.
We found that Leavers, on average, had a worse mobile experience before they switched than the typical experience observed by our users on their original network provider. Leavers across all three national MNOs on average spent twice the amount of time without a mobile signal compared to the average scores on their networks; they also spent less time connected to either a 3G or 4G mobile connection — 3G/4G Availability — and they experienced lower 4G Availability. Our data therefore suggests that users experiencing mobile network pain points are more likely to change their mobile service provider.
We then looked at the mobile experience of Leavers on their new mobile network provider, during the first 30 days following their change, and compared that against their experience in the previous 30 days, when they were still on their original mobile network.
Opensignal data shows that Leavers had a better experience on their new mobile network compared to their previous one on two out of the three operators. While O2 and Vodafone Leavers enjoyed an improved experience after switching, we did not see a significant difference for Telekom Leavers, as we saw a statistical tie with overlapping confidence intervals in all three measures of mobile signal availability that we analyzed.
In order to understand why we didn’t see a statistically significant difference in the mobile availability measures of Telekom Leavers on their new operator compared to their experience on Telekom, we looked at the distribution of our Leavers across urban and rural districts.
The analysis of Opensignal’s users shows a higher proportion of Telekom Leavers in rural districts — relative to O2 and Vodafone — which is where we found Telekom users on average experienced better 4G availability compared to users on the other two networks in our latest urban-rural mobile experience analysis of Germany’s operators. This means that we saw relatively more Telekom Leavers in areas where Telekom had an edge in mobile availability over O2 and Vodafone, which explains why Telekom Leavers, on average, weren’t seeing a significant positive change to their mobile availability on their new network.
Our data shows that Germany’s Leavers had a worse mobile experience before they switched to another network, compared to the typical experience on their original network. Also, Leavers from two out of three mobile operators got a better experience on their new mobile network after they changed. This proves that mobile network experience is an extremely important driver of churn in Germany.
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