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Mobile Networks Update: Switzerland (November 2018)
A quick glance at our awards table would suggest not a great deal has changed in the Switzerland mobile market since our last State of Mobile Networks report. Swisscom kept its awards in four categories — including the coveted 4G speed crown — and drew in one other metric. Meanwhile Sunrise won our other headline-grabbing metric, 4G availability, while it tied with Salt in 4G upload speed. For this report, we drew on over 133 million measurements from 12,900 devices to analyze the performance of Switzerland's three national operators, as well as taking a look at 4G availability experience across the country's seven regions.
- Swisscom has become the first operator to pass the 40 Mbps milestone in our Switzerland 4G download speed analysis. The operator increased its average speed by over 3 Mbps in our measurements over the past six months to move further ahead of its rivals. Sunrise's 4G download speed has somewhat stalled at just under 35 Mbps in our analysis, while Salt increased its own score by over 3 Mbps to force a draw for second place.
- It was a similar story in our analysis of overall download speed, where Swisscom also increased its score by over 3 Mbps to keep its title and pull further ahead of its competitors. Sunrise's average speed again remained virtually static in our measurements, while Salt increased its score by nearly 4 Mbps to put pressure on its rivals. Swisscom also won both our latency awards, while the most notable growth came from Salt which saw an improvement of over 5 milliseconds in our 4G latency category.
- In our analysis of 4G upload speed, we recorded another draw between Salt and Sunrise, as neither operator saw much change in their scores over the past six months. But our users on third-placed Swisscom's network experienced an increase of over 1.5 Mbps in average 4G upload speeds. The closest speed race, though, was in our 3G download analysis, where we tabulated a three-way draw with all the operators' scores falling within a narrow 0.7-Mbps range.
- Finally, Sunrise kept its crown in our 4G availability analysis. The operator is now within one percentage point of the 90% milestone. In our regional analysis, Sunrise indeed passed that milestone with a score of 90.3% in the Northwest, and is coming very close in a number of other regions. Sunrise saw an incremental increase in its 4G availability score, as did second-placed Swisscom, while Salt's LTE availability increased by 3 percentage points in the last six months to close the gap on the leaders.
Opensignal Awards Table
 | Download Speed: 4G | Download Speed: 3G | Download Speed: Overall | Upload Speed: 4G | Latency: 4G | Latency: 3G | Availability: 4G |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Salt |
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Sunrise |
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Swisscom |
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Performance by Metric
Download Speed: 4G
Download Speed: 3G
Download Speed: Overall
Upload Speed: 4G
Latency: 4G
Latency: 3G
Availability: 4G
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:
S
Salt
S
Sunrise
S
Swisscom | Region | Availability: 4G |
|---|---|
| Central | |
| East | |
| Espace Mittelland | |
| Lake Geneva | |
| Northwest | |
| Ticino | |
| Zurich |
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, 133,691,865 datapoints were collected from 12,901 users during the period: 2018-08-01 - 2018-10-29.
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.