State of Mobile Networks: Germany (May 2018)

In our first look at the German mobile market, we examined the 3G and 4G user experience offered by the three nationwide operators, and discovered that one service provider stood head and shoulders above its peers. Telekom claimed five of our seven awards, winning the coveted 4G speed and 4G availability categories, as well as dominating our regional analysis of 10 of the largest cities in Germany. Meanwhile, Vodafone scooped both our 3G and 4G latency awards, as the UK-based operator is upping the competition with Telekom.

Despite an impressive performance from Telekom, Germany remains amongst the lowest rated countries in Western Europe for 4G experience, with an average LTE speed of just 22.7 Mbps in our most recent analysis, while it fared little better in terms of 4G availability with a score of 65.7%. On a national level, Telekom is way ahead in these two metrics, as its competitors are holding down Germany's scores. But in reality, the German mobile market is far more complex.

For this report, OpenSignal parsed more than 855 million measurements taken from nearly 69,000 smart devices between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2018. We also performed a detailed regional analysis in this report, breaking down our 4G download speed, latency and availability metrics for 10 of Germany's largest cities. Let's start by looking at 4G download speed, the metric in which we saw the largest disparity between the operators.

Telekom sweeps the board in network speed and availability

Telekom offered the fastest 4G experience by far, registering average download speeds of 33.6 Mbps in our measurements. This score was over 12 Mbps faster than Vodafone's average tested speed of 20.9 Mbps, and more than double O2's 16.6 Mbps. This trend was repeated in our 4G upload metric, where Telekom's speed of 11.5 Mbps was close to 5 Mbps faster than either of its rivals in our measurements. Telekom also led fairly comfortably in our 3G download speed metric. Its score of 10.5 Mbps was over 2 Mbps faster than the other two.

Former incumbent Deutsche Telekom's mobile unit was also way ahead of the pack in our 4G availability metric. Our testers were able to tap into Telekom's 4G network 81.3% of the time, a score that easily beat its rivals by over 10 percentage points. Vodafone and O2 scored 69.4% and 59.2% respectively. Telekom also won our overall download speed prize, where it was over 13 Mbps faster than either of its rivals, partly as a result of its superior 4G availability results. Our Telekom users not only experienced faster speeds on their LTE connections, but they were able to make those connections more often. There are a number of reasons that Telekom has found itself so far ahead in the 4G race.

Both Telekom and Vodafone are investing heavily in their 4G networks, with the application of LTE-Advanced and carrier aggregation technologies, while Telekom is re-farming its 900 MHz spectrum for 4G and rolling out small cell technology to urban areas to increase capacity and reduce the data demand on existing metropolitan base stations. As Germany races towards nationwide 4G coverage, we will be keeping a close eye on the rising competition between Telekom and Vodafone.

The merger of O2 Deutschland with Germany's fourth operator E-Plus has had a marked effect on the operator landscape. O2's owner Telefónica bought E-Plus from KPN in 2014, but only completed the brand and customer migration to the O2 network last year. Telefónica's description of the merger as an enormous effort in terms of the scale and complexity is not much of an overstatement, as the operator has had to cope with migrating millions of customers to its network. O2 did gain some spectrum assets from E-Plus, but not a huge amount, and the distraction of the merger has inevitably played a part in allowing O2's rivals to pull ahead in the push to 4G in Germany.

Telekom's dominance is also linked to the operator's position as Germany's fixed-line former incumbent, and the nature of mobile licensing in the country. Deutsche Telekom owns a significant amount of high-speed fiber backbone in the country, enabling it to construct a backhaul network that can support high data capacity relatively rapidly in comparison to its rivals. As data use increases and average speeds climb ever higher, fiber is becoming crucial to connect cell sites. And Vodafone’s recent acquisition of cable operator Unitymedia will offer it greater access to high capacity fixed networks across Germany. However, there are already some signs that Vodafone is closing the gap on the leader Telekom in the 4G race.

Vodafone's recent network upgrades did exert themselves in one category of our metrics. The operator won both our latency categories, which essentially measure a network's response time. Latency is a key factor in real-time communications apps like VoIP and video chat — the lower the score, the better. In our 4G latency category, Vodafone's score of 37.1 milliseconds easily beat both Telekom's 42.1ms and O2's 49.7ms, while in 3G latency Vodafone's score of 55.6ms was close to 10ms more responsive than either of its rivals.

Vodafone's challenge apparent in Germany's big cities

As expected, Telekom dominated our 4G download speed and availability metrics in our analysis of 10 of Germany's biggest cities. The former incumbent won the top prize in eight out of 10 of the cities we examined, averaging 4G download speeds of over 40 Mbps in seven of them. O2 was once again a fair way behind its rivals with average speeds of less than 20 Mbps in all of our city measurements.

Vodafone closed the distance on Telekom in our regional 4G availability metric. The operator drew with the incumbent in four cities, but the difference between the two was generally only a couple of percentage points across the board, as both operators registered scores of around 80% 4G availability in almost all the cities we analyzed. Telekom had the highest individual city scores, registering 88.8% 4G reach in Nuremberg and 87.8% in Leipzig, while O2 was once again some way behind its rivals in our results. The Telefónica subsidiary managed to pass the 70% availability milestone in only half the cities we measured.

Despite some impressive reach in its cities, the fact remains that at a national level, Germany has some catching up to do if it wants to match its European peers in 4G speed and 4G availability. Nonetheless, the completion of O2's merger and Vodafone's fresh challenge to Telekom’s dominance of the multi-play sector means we expect to see this market mature pretty quickly over the next few years. Germany is certainly one market worth keeping an eye on.