5G has been available in Norway for quite some time — commercial services were launched by Telia and Telenor in the first half of 2020, and ice followed with its own 5G network in late 2021. While 5G is not as mature as its forerunner, 4G, it has had enough time to seriously impact the Norwegian mobile experience.
While the average speeds our users see with a 5G connection have not significantly changed in the last year, the amount of time our users spend with a 5G connection has risen greatly, which has pushed up overall speeds. 5G has also improved in consistency of speeds across hours of the day. Now, 5G Download Speed drops by a smaller percentage throughout the day compared with 2022. It is also more consistent than 4G. The relative daily decline in 5G Download Speed is now lower than the decline in 4G Download Speed during busier hours.
Compared to the same time period a year prior, users’ 5G Download Speed and 5G Upload Speed have remained statistically unchanged. However, the proportion of time that our users with 5G devices spend with an active 5G connection has risen dramatically — from 9.1% to 13%. Users spending more time on 5G allows them to benefit more from the impressive speeds that it brings; this can be seen in the increase in both overall Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience.
5G Games Experience has also increased by a considerable amount — 6.8 points, from 76.5 points to 83.3 points on a 100-point scale. This increase brings the 5G multiplayer mobile gaming experience from the very bottom of the Good (75-85) category to the very top. While it doesn’t change the experience category, the reduction in delay and the increased controllability while gaming is easily noticeable.
The benefit that 5G provides can be best understood when looking at the overall experience of our users that have a 5G device and a 5G subscription (5G users) compared to the average experience of all of our users in Norway (all user average). The overall experience of 5G users is much better for Download Speed Experience, with 5G users enjoying download speeds 17.9Mbps (18.6%) above the all user average.
Overall download speeds have increased for both the all user average and also for 5G users, despite 5G Download Speed staying statistically unchanged. The increase in time spent with an active 5G connection, in conjunction with the increase in 4G Download Speed is the cause of the improved experience.
5G continues to pack a punch when it comes to the uplift in speed over 4G. Increases in the 4G speeds seen by our Norwegian users have closed the gap slightly, but 5G still blows 4G out of the water. The average 5G Upload Speed is now 2.3 times faster than that seen by our users on 4G, while 5G Download Speed (256Mbps) is three times faster than the already impressive 4G Download Speed (86.7Mbps).
Outright scores aren’t the only measure of a network, resilience to changing usage patterns and higher traffic loads that can cause congestion is also important. During the morning the network has less traffic and is more lightly loaded than in the evening, leading to faster speeds.
Since 2022, the drop in 4G Download Speed throughout the day has worsened. Over the course of the day the 4G Download Speed now falls 14.7% from its peak at 6am - midday, while a year ago it only fell 9.2% in the late evening (9pm - midnight) period. However, the variation throughout the day for 5G Download Speed has improved, with the drop in later hours now smaller. For the late evening period, the decrease in users’ 5G speed was initially far worse than that for 4G, at almost 20% — it is now smaller than that seen for 4G, at 12.8%.
While average 5G speeds have not changed significantly in Norway between 2022 and 2023, users’ overall mobile experience has still improved and evolved. The proportion of time that our users spend with a 5G connection has increased considerably, allowing users to access the benefits that 5G provides more often. Along with this, 5G speeds have become more consistent, dropping relatively less throughout the day — this is despite the overall traffic on 5G networks likely increasing over time.
You can follow the 5G progress of the individual national operators in Opensignal’s reports on the Norwegian mobile network experience. Read the June 2023 report here.
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