In our analysis of 24 of Brazil's largest cities, we found our regional awards largely reflected our national awards — with two big exceptions. In Video Experience, Claro faced a major challenge from Vivo in urban areas. Meanwhile in Latency Experience, our winners differed all over the map of Brazil, with Oi — which finished last in our national rankings — winning more city-level latency awards than the national winner TIM.
In Video Experience, Vivo took almost as many metro-level awards as Claro. It won outright in six markets and tied for the win in eight, while Claro had eight solo wins and seven draws. Claro, however, clearly had Brazil's economic powerhouses in the southeast locked down in this metric. It won our Video Experience award in Brazil's three largest cities: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.
We saw many operators improve considerably on their national Video Experience scores in urban areas. TIM and Vivo were able to elevate their Video Experience scores to Good ratings in a host of markets. And in seven cities — Aracaju, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Maceió, Natal and Recife — either Vivo or Claro earned Very Good ratings, meaning our users experienced very short video load times and few interruptions during playback, even at higher resolutions.
In Latency Experience, our city-level awards were widely distributed among the different operators. Every operator won our Latency Experience award in at least one city. Even regional operator Nextel took one prize, in São Paulo. Oi, however, overcame its relative weakness in latency nationally to win our Latency Experience award outright in eight cities while drawing for the lead in two more.
Our city analysis also highlighted the big disparity in network response time between the major population centers in the southern portion of Brazil and the rest of the country. Our users in cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Porto Alegre generally experienced average overall latencies under 60ms, but in cities outside of that region — including very large cities like Fortaleza, Manaus and Recife — we typically saw Latency Experience scores over 90ms, in some cases well over 100ms. That's likely due to the fact that much of Brazil's fiber-optic infrastructure is concentrated in the highly populated, economically powerful zones of the south and southeast.
In our Download and Upload Speed Experience categories, Claro extended its national dominance to the local level, while TIM was the undisputed winner in 4G Availability in all but three of the 24 cities we analyzed. We did, however, see some impressive individual results in our metro breakdown. Our Claro users averaged overall download speeds of 30 Mbps or more in four cities: Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Florianópolis and Salvador. Meanwhile, we saw the level of consumer 4G access truly soar in many metro areas. 4G Availability scores of 80% or higher were common on most operator networks in the biggest cities, and in 10 markets TIM was able to achieve impressively high scores of 90% or more. In those cities we're truly starting to see the full impact of Brazil's 700 MHz networks.
Select any region or city below to display individual breakdown