State of Mobile Networks: Mexico (October 2016)

Mexico's LTE rollout continues to steam ahead as mobile giant Telcel faces off against its two smaller competitors Movistar and AT&T Mexico. Just as we saw in our first State of Mobile Networks report for Mexico, AT&T seems to be presenting the biggest challenge to Telcel in terms of network performance. It's been less than two years since AT&T swooped over the U.S. border, acquiring Mexican operators Iusacell and Nextel Mexico, and it's only been a year since it launched its first LTE network. But OpenSignal is already seeing AT&T match up against Telcel in many 4G performance metrics.

For this report, we drew on more than 420 million measurements taken by nearly 30,000 OpenSignal smartphone users in Mexico between June and August. Since publishing our last Mexico report in April, OpenSignal made some adjustments to both the way we collect data from our smartphone apps and the methodology we use to parse that data. The update allows us to make more measurements, examine new types of network metrics and hone the precision of the measurements we've always collected, helping us isolate the typical consumer mobile experience more effectively (for more details, see our recent blog post). The changes haven't affected our overall rankings of networks in Mexico or around the world, but for sake of analytical rigor we aren't making any direct comparisons between results collected from the two different methodologies.

While we examine the nationwide 3G and 4G performance of Mexico's big 3 operators — América Móvil's Telcel, Telefónica's Movistar and AT&T Mexico — OpenSignal is also taking its first glimpse at how 4G networks stacked up in the country's capital and largest population center Mexico City.

4G vs. 3G

Telcel and AT&T split our speed awards with AT&T winning top honors in 3G and overall speed and Telcel leading the 4G category. Our testers on Telcel's LTE network averaged download speeds of 23.3 Mbps. AT&T wasn't far behind in our 4G measurements, though, averaging 19.3 Mbps per connection. Meanwhile Movistar came in last in our summer tests, averaging 15.3 Mbps. Telcel may have won our 4G speed award, but that doesn't mean it won our overall speed metric, which tracks the typical data speed users see across operators' 3G and 4G networks. AT&T took that honor. That's due mainly to AT&T's high performing HSPA network.

We clocked average AT&T 3G speeds at 4.1 Mbps, while our measurements for both Telcel and Movistar connections came in under 3 Mbps. Those fast 3G connections combined with AT&T's good showing in our 4G speed metric meant AT&T was able to deliver average overall connection speeds of 10.9 Mbps, compared to 8.5 Mbps for Telcel, according to our data.

When it came to 4G availability, we saw a much closer race between Telcel and AT&T. Rather than track geographic coverage, our availability metric measures the proportion of time users have access to a particular network. In this case, OpenSignal users were able to latch onto an AT&T LTE signal 66.5% of the time and a Telcel LTE signal 64.9% of the time — both results were close enough to produce a statistical tie in our analysis. Movistar, however, still has some work to do to catch up with either operator. Our testers had access to a Movistar 4G connection just over half the time.

The final metric we tracked was network latency, which measures the reaction of a network. A lower latency connection means data makes the round trip between a smartphone and the network much more quickly, enabling more responsive internet browsing and producing less lag time in communications apps. Telcel won our 4G latency award with an average response time of 49.1 milliseconds, while AT&T and Movistar shared our 3G latency prize with response times just over 120ms.

A look at the Capital

When we drilled down into our measurements for the capital region, we found that LTE signals were much more readily available in Mexico City. While AT&T was tied with Telcel in 4G availability nationally, it won 4G availability in Mexico City outright. Our AT&T network testers were able to see a 4G connection 75% of the time.

All three operators, however, saw big improvements over their national numbers in the former Distrito Federal, but none saw as big an improvement as Movistar. The Telefónica subsidiary scored 63.3% in our availability metric, 12 percentage points higher than its nationwide availability rating. Even with that big boost in 4G accessibility though, Movistar wasn't able to catch up to Telcel, which came in second in our availability rankings for Mexico City. Our users were able to connect to Telcel's LTE network in the capital 68% of the time.

In terms of speed, operators' performance in Mexico City largely lined up with their national results. Just as it won OpenSignal's nationwide 4G speed award, Telcel won our 4G speed prize in Mexico's largest city, averaging 23 Mbps in our measurements. Telcel also had the lowest 4G latency in our tests in Mexico City, averaging 39.4ms.

As always, the mobile competitive landscape in Mexico is constantly evolving. Both AT&T and Movistar have announced plans to expand their LTE networks, and they're doing so at an opportune time. América Móvil continues to face regulatory constraints until it pares down its outsized share of the Mexican mobile market (which has been as high as 70%). There's no better time to grow when the dominant player in your industry is being pressured to shrink.