Mobile Networks Update: Australia (April 2018)

In the six months since Opensignal's last State of Mobile Networks report for Australia, Vodafone has been quite busy. In our most recent test period covering January through March, Vodafone moved into a lead role in all of our metrics, either winning or drawing every award category. In our inaugural Mobile Networks Update for Australia, we've refreshed our measurements to see what has changed in the 3G and 4G mobile data experience offered by the country's three main operators.

  • Vodafone has jumped ahead of Telstra in our 4G speed metric, averaging LTE downloads of 40 Mbps. You could never accuse any Australian operator of pokey 4G speeds, though. All three major operators averaged downloads greater than 33 Mbps in our LTE tests, which is nearly double the global 4G average of 16.9 Mbps as measured in Opensignal's recent State of LTE report.
  • All three operators have expanded the reach of their LTE networks over the last six months. We measured increases in Optus', Telstra's and Vodafone's 4G availability scores by at least 1 percentage point, but two operators emerged as leaders in this metric. Optus and Vodafone tied for our 4G availability award as our measurements showed both provided 4G connections to our users just over 88% of the time.
  • Though Vodafone walked away with our national 4G speed award, Telstra turned in some impressive results in Australia's biggest cities. Telstra won our 4G speed award in Brisbane with an exceptional download average of 51.4 Mbps, and it drew with Vodafone for the prize in Perth and Sydney. Meanwhile, 4G availability in the big cities was a much more closely fought contest. In all four of the major cities we analyzed, we recorded two-and three-way draws, with all three operators taking a share of multiple regional awards.

Opensignal Awards Table

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Download Speed: Overall Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

Optus

medal medal medal

Telstra

Vodafone

medal medal medal medal medal medal

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Enjoyed our report? All our analysis is based on real measurements collected by millions of mobile network users. No simulations, no approximations: just real-world experience.

Performance by Metric

Download Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

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.

Regional Performance

This chart shows the regional winners in each category Opensignal measures. Click on the icons to see a more detailed graph showing each operator’s metrics in a particular region.

Legend: Telstra Optus Vodafone
RegionDownload Speed: 4GLatency: 4GAvailability: 4G
Brisbane
Melbourne
Perth
Sydney

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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, 367,758,078 datapoints were collected from 22,415 users during the period: 2018-01-01 - 2018-03-31.

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.