Mexico

AT&T pulled off a big coup 12 months ago when it grabbed our 4G Availability award from massive incumbent Telcel, which had a three-year headstart over AT&T in its LTE rollout. But after its big surge forward in 4G Availability in 2017, AT&T's growth was relatively flat in 2018. The U.S.-owned operator's score of 81.9% was certainly enough to maintain its lead in our 4G Availability rankings, but Telcel has begun to make up lost ground. Since our last report, Telcel's 4G Availability score has improved by almost 2 percentage points to 79.1%, closing the gap with AT&T.

Movistar, however, has shown the biggest improvement in this metric. Its 4G Availability score jumped nearly 6 percentage points since our last report. This gain wasn't enough to overcome either of the two leaders, but Movistar is now above the 70% mark in this metric.

Telcel won the first of its many awards in this test period in our Video Experience category. Our Video Experience metric measures video quality streamed over mobile networks to devices, taking video load time, stalling rates and picture resolution into account. In our 100-point scale, Telcel had a score of 60.3, which falls into the Good range (55-65) of Video Experience. AT&T also garnered a Good rating with a score of 56.8, but Movistar landed in Fair, one category below Good, with a score of 47.6.

When we break down Video Experience by type of connection, we see some clear differences in the video capabilities of each operator's 4G service. Looking at 4G connections alone, Telcel's score was 74.4, a Very Good score (65-75) in our scale and less than a point shy of an Excellent rating. Our data shows that as long as Telcel customers have access to a 4G connection, they're getting an impressive level of video quality, characterized by short load times and minimal interruptions in playback even at higher resolutions.

Meanwhile, Movistar scored higher than AT&T in 4G Video Experience with a Very Good rating, even though AT&T came in second in our overall Video Experience rankings. While Movistar's LTE connections were providing our users with a superior 4G Video Experience in our analysis, AT&T's 4G network was more accessible, so our users were able to view video over 4G connections more often. That, along with AT&T's higher score in 3G Video Experience, pushed AT&T above Movistar in our overall Video Experience rankings.

A year ago, AT&T was the award winner in Download Speed Experience in Mexico, but for the second report in a row, AT&T's download speeds have taken a substantial downturn, establishing Telcel as the leader in this metric. Last year, AT&T introduced new unlimited-4G-data prepaid plans under its Unefon brand for only 10 pesos a day in order to encourage more widespread use of its 4G services. In our results we separate Unefon users from AT&T Mexico's main postpaid customer base, so the measurements we collect from AT&T subscribers don't include measurements from devices on the new Unefon plans. But it's likely we're seeing an indirect impact on AT&T's overall 4G capacity due to these new prepaid plans. Typically when operators introduce unlimited data plans or reduce the price of data, it increases data usage and depresses speeds unless operators counteract that usage by building more network capacity. The success of AT&T's new Unefon plans could be boosting the average amount of data consumed per subscriber overall, eating up capacity for all users — prepaid and postpaid alike.

Whatever the direct cause for the drop in speed, its magnitude is considerable. In the last 12 months, AT&T's Download Speed Experience has decreased 5.7 Mbps (34%), while its 4G Download Speed has fallen 8.5 Mbps (39%), according to our analysis. AT&T now has the slowest average 4G Download Speed in our measurements. It only surpasses Movistar in Download Speed Experience by virtue of its superior 4G Availability, according to our analysis. Meanwhile, Telcel is cementing its lead in our download categories, not by boosting its speeds but by maintaining the status quo. The more AT&T's speeds suffer in our metrics, the more entrenched Telcel becomes at the top of our rankings.

Telcel won our Upload Speed Experience award with an average connection of 7.5 Mbps. Meanwhile, the declines we're tracking in AT&T's Download Speed Experience scores didn't apply to upload. AT&T came in second in this category with an Upload Speed Experience score of 6.5 Mbps, while Movistar was relatively far behind the two leaders with a score of 4.2 Mbps.

When we look at upload speed by technology, we find that the upstream capabilities of most of Mexico's 4G services to be quite powerful. Telcel's 4G Upload Speed score exceeded 10 Mbps, which is a significant milestone. Meanwhile, AT&T and Movistar's 4G Upload Speeds were about half that of their 4G Download Speed scores. We typically see a much bigger differential between upload and download on the same 4G network. Whatever download speed limitations Mexico's consumers might face, we're not seeing the same constraints on upload. That could become a key differentiator for Mexican operators as consumers begin to demand more symmetrical mobile data connections.

Telcel's fourth win came in our Latency Experience category. It was well ahead of both its rivals with an average score of 62.1 milliseconds. That said, none of Mexico's operators had very impressive scores in our Latency Experience metric. Latency measures the response time of a network (the lower the score the better), and it's a key factor in determining how real-time communications and gaming applications perform on mobile connections. While operators in many countries are pushing Latency Experience scores down to 30ms or lower, Mexico's best Latency Experience average is double that.