Mobile Trends

Opensignal has analyzed mobile subscriber churn in Italy and found that our users who changed their mobile operator on average had a worse mobile experience before they switched compared to the typical experience on their original network. Also, our data shows that, while the main brands of TIM, Vodafone and WindTre are losing smartphone users, their respective lower-cost brands — Kena Mobile, ho. and Very Mobile — are gaining users.

The latest generation of mobile technology, 5G, doesn’t just enable much faster average speeds than 4G, it also adds a tremendous amount of new capacity. 5G allows operators to tap into new higher frequency bands above 3GHz that have never been previously used for mobile services. 

Opensignal’s data shows that short-term variations in average mobile data consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with variations in our users’ average Download Speed Experience across multiple countries. In part, this is because other ways of improving capacity such as additional wireless spectrum, could not be brought into use quickly in most countries to help with changed mobile usage.

Opensignal has analyzed how much time our German smartphone users spent connected to 4G networks — 4G Availability — during the 90 days period starting on April 1, 2020. Our 4G users on average experienced 4G Availability of 90.9% and 84.2%, respectively, across urban and rural districts.

In the past few months we have seen how the COVID-19 pandemic affected users’ mobile network experience across the globe. For the most part, mobile networks have been highly resilient.