Mobile Networks Update: Germany (October 2018)

It's been six months since Opensignal's inaugural State of Mobile Networks: Germany report, so it's time to revisit the market to see what's changed. A glance at our national leaderboard would suggest not much, as Telekom continues to dominate our speed and 4G availability awards, while Vodafone kept hold of both our latency trophies. But there are signs of growth in German mobile, particularly from Telefónica's O2, which has been very much in third place in our analysis. For this report, we analyzed over 950 million measurements from 84,500 devices to rank the main three national operators O2, Telekom and Vodafone, including analysis of the mobile experience in 10 of Germany's largest cities. Let's start by looking at our speed metrics.

  • Telekom kept its 4G download speed crown, with exactly the same score, 36.6 Mbps, as six months ago in our analysis. Vodafone's 4G download average was also fairly static at 21.4 Mbps, while third-placed O2 saw the only notable growth in this metric, increasing its average 4G download speed by over 1 Mbps to reach 18.1 Mbps.
  • We saw a similar story in our analysis of overall download speed, which factors in the combined speeds of operators' 3G and 4G networks and the level of access to each technology. Telekom won our award with a fairly static score of 30.4 Mbps – but nonetheless the leader continues to impress with an average speed more than 11 Mbps faster than its rivals. Vodafone saw incremental growth of 0.6 Mbps to 17.55 Mbps, while O2 increased its average speed by over 1 Mbps to 14.3 Mbps. Meanwhile, Telekom comfortably won our analysis of 3G download speed, with little movement in any of the three operators' scores.
  • O2 also managed a small increase in our 4G upload speed analysis, where Telekom kept its crown with a stable connection average of 11.1 Mbps. O2 grew its average score by over 0.7 Mbps to 7.39 Mbps in our measurements, while Vodafone's fell by 0.6 Mbps to 6.1 Mbps – allowing O2 to pull ahead and claim second place. In our other metrics, we saw little change in 4G availability as Telekom maintained its lead of over 11 percentage points, while our analysis of latency also revealed stagnant growth. Vodafone comfortably won both our 3G and 4G latency categories.
  • O2 remains firmly the third-placed operator across our analysis, but the Telefónica operator is showing some signs of growth in our speed metrics to close the gap on its rivals. O2 is ramping up its coverage in Germany, installing or upgrading 3,000 base stations in the first half of 2018, while it recently signed a deal to use Telekom's fibre network to connect up to 5,000 towers. But does O2 have the legs to overtake Vodafone and challenge the dominance of Telekom? Keep watching our analysis of the German mobile market to find out.

Opensignal Awards Table

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

O2

Telekom

medal medal medal medal medal

Vodafone

medal medal

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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.

Upload Speed: 4G

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

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: Telekom Vodafone O2
RegionDownload Speed: 4GLatency: 4GAvailability: 4G
Berlin
Cologne
Dusseldorf
Frankfurt
Hamburg
Hannover
Leipzig
Munich
Nuremberg
Stuttgart

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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, 950,514,854 datapoints were collected from 84,518 users during the period: 2018-07-01 - 2018-09-28.

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.