State of Mobile Networks: Spain (July 2017)

Spain is one of Europe’s largest mobile communications markets, with four major mobile operators and a number of virtual network operators and resellers filling the landscape. This first OpenSignal State of Mobile Networks: Spain report looks at those four leading operators: Telefónica’s Movistar, Orange, Vodafone and MásMóvil’s Yoigo, all of whom appear to be doing a very good job for Spanish subscribers. Our results draw on more than 226 million measurements captured from 20,436 smartphones and smart devices between March 1st and May 31st this year.

A tight race for 4G dominance

The first metric we looked at was accessibility of 4G on these operators; what we found was a very good level of availability across the board from all networks. While our LTE availability results showed a clear winner in Vodafone, there wasn’t much separating it from the other three operators. Our Vodafone testers had access to 4G signals more than 78% of the time, but the other three were in a very close race for second place with their subscribers still able to access 4G services more than 70% of the time.

In our 4G speed category, Movistar and Vodafone tied for first place with the highest average download speeds of 31.8 Mbps and 32.2 Mbps, respectively, making it statistically too close to separate the two of them. These winning speeds, however, were only just ahead of third-placed Orange, which averaged downloads of 28.8 Mbps in our tests. Meanwhile, last-placed Yoigo, originally the first operator in Spain to launch LTE, offered speeds just in excess of 20 Mbps, according to our data.

In our 3G speed tests, Yoigo joined Movistar and Vodafone in this category’s tie for first place, with all three operators averaging HSPA download speeds greater than 5.7Mbps. Orange was in last place, but with average speeds in excess of 5 Mbps in our tests, its users still enjoyed healthy 3G speeds when its 4G service was unavailable.

Our last speed metric looks at overall download connection speeds, not only taking 3G and 4G speeds into account, but also network availability. And it’s another tie for first place between 4G-speed winners Movistar and Vodafone, with the operators delivering 21.7 Mbps and 22.36 Mbps respectively in our measurements.

Network latency for both 3G and 4G is the final user-experience category we measured. This metric determines, in milliseconds, the delay that data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. Our results for 4G services show Vodafone in first place with latency of 41.3ms, more than six milliseconds ahead of its nearest rival, Movistar. In our 3G responsiveness tests we saw the roles reversed, with first-place accolades going to Spain’s biggest mobile operator, Movistar, with an average HSPA latency of 66.5ms. Vodafone was second with a latency of 73.6ms.

A global leader in 4G

LTE arrived in Spain in 2013 when all four players launched 4G, and since that time they’ve managed to keep pace with one another. As our results show: We recorded ties in our three speed categories and in the in 4G availability all four operators were incredibly close.

Our latest State of LTE report, based on 1st quarter 2017 data, shows Spain’s 4G speed was in the top 20 of the 75 countries we analyzed with an overall average download connection of 29 Mbps. Movistar and Vodafone do a lot to pull up Spain’s average with 30 Mbps-plus download speeds. The country also sits comfortably in our top 30 for 4G availability delivering an average 72.47% availability, though Spain is still some way behind the impressive global leader South Korea, which boasts 96.38% availability in our report.

Spanish subscribers can rest assured their operators are delivering good results based on our findings. And things look set to improve further. Telefónica, Nokia and Qualcomm are currently cooperating to trial increasingly fast 4G speeds using several technical advances. These include multiple-antenna technologies and new more advanced modulation schemes, both of which improve data rates while using spectrum more efficiently. Finally, last year’s spectrum auction saw the Spanish regulator sell off a number of 2.6GHz and 3.5GHz spectrum chunks, which should lead to capacity improvements nationwide.