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Mobile Networks Update: Switzerland (November 2017)
In the six months since we last reported on Switzerland, the winners of our six awards categories didn't change, but we definitely saw a lot of movement in the individual metrics. For the first Mobile Networks Update on Switzerland, Opensignal is refreshing its analysis of the alpine country's mobile market, highlighting the changes to 3G and 4G performance we've tracked since our May report.
- We recorded a big jump in LTE availability from all three nationwide operators in this August-October test period. Salt experienced the biggest bump in availability, an increase from 69.6% to 78.8% between reports, but its two competitors saw multiple percentage point increases as well. Sunrise and Swisscom ended October in a statistical tie for top honors in 4G availability. Our testers were able to latch onto both operator's LTE network more than 84% of the time.
- While Salt and Sunrise saw modest increases in their 4G speed test measurements, Swisscom's 4G speeds skyrocketed. Its average LTE download speed increased from 20.7 Mbps in our May report to 28.6 Mbps in our latest data — that's an astonishing 40% jump. Recent network upgrades could explain the speed surge, but a more likely reason for the increase is Swisscom opening up the spigot on its LTE network. Swisscom typically restricts customers on lower-priced plans to lower speeds, so any relaxation of that policy would produce sizable boosts to the bandwidth its customers experience.
- Despite Swisscom's huge speed gains, Sunrise held onto the 4G speed crown. Sunrise averaged LTE downloads of 36.8 Mbps in our tests, 8 Mbps ahead of its nearest rival. Those 4G speeds, along with Sunrise's high 4G availability, meant it also took Opensignal's overall speed award with an average download of 27.9 Mbps across its mobile data networks.
Opensignal Awards Table
 | Download Speed: 3G | Download Speed: Overall | Latency: 4G | Latency: 3G | Availability: 4G |
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Salt |
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Sunrise |
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Swisscom |
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Performance by Metric
Download Speed: 3G
This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users.
Download Speed: Overall
This metric shows the average download speed experienced by Opensignal users across all of an operator's 3G and 4G networks. Overall speed doesn't just factor in 3G and LTE speeds, but also the availability of each network technology. Operators with lower LTE availability tend to have lower overall speeds because their customers spend more time connected to slower 3G networks.
Latency: 4G
This metric shows the average latency for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.
Latency: 3G
This metric shows the average latency for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.
Availability: 4G
This metric shows the proportion of time Opensignal users have an LTE connection available to them on each operator’s network. It's a measure of how often users can access a 4G network rather than a measure of geographic or population coverage.
Our Methodology
Opensignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 3 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide.
Our measurements are collected at all hours of the day, every day of the year, under conditions of normal usage, including inside buildings and outdoors, in cities and the countryside, and everywhere in between. By analyzing on-device measurements recorded in the places where subscribers actually live, work and travel, we report on mobile network service the way users truly experience it.
For this particular report, 97,818,944 datapoints were collected from 10,593 users during the period: 2017-08-01 - 2017-10-31.
We continually adapt our methodology to best represent the changing experience of consumers on mobile networks and, therefore, comparisons of the results to past reports should be considered indicative only. For more information on how we collect and analyze our data, see our methodology page.
For every metric we've calculated statistical confidence intervals and plotted them on all of the graphs. When confidence intervals overlap for a certain metric, our measured results are too close to declare a winner in a particular category. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.
Opensignal Limited retains ownership of this report including all intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis. Reports produced by Opensignal Limited may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed, published for any commercial purpose (including use in advertisements or other promotional content) without prior written consent.