Uruguay

One of the main indicators of a country’s mobile experience is the time spent connected to 4G networks, or 4G Availability. In Uruguay, our users’ 4G Availability ranges from 78.5% on Claro to 90.6% on Movistar. For reference, our users on Claro saw a higher share of time spent on 4G than we found in our users in 9 Latin American countries in our State of Mobile Experience report, while the 4G Availability of our users on Movistar’s is higher than for any Latin American country in the same report, with Peru’s users being the closest at an average 83.3% time on LTE.

Although Uruguay’s enviable 4G Availability can be attributed to all three operators, it was Telefónica’s Movistar that won our award with an impressive 90.4%, setting a very high bar, not only for local rivals Antel and Claro, but also for the entire continent, where we have yet to see any other operator reach the 90% national 4G Availability milestone in our reports.

Trailing 5 percentage points behind Movistar, our Antel users recorded a 4G Availability of 85.5%, which was in turn 7 percentage points ahead of what our users experienced on América Móvil’s Claro. Even so, being able to connect to 4G networks 78.3% of the time, our users on Claro can access LTE more often than users on the networks with the highest 4G Availability in Colombia, Ecuador, or Costa Rica.

Video Experience in Uruguay is also ahead of its neighboring countries, with a consistently Good rating, which means that there is generally little video stalling and quick loading times on lower resolutions, but still not enough to guarantee a smooth experience particularly at higher resolutions. By comparison, our users in Brazil, Chile, and Peru are split between operators offering Fair and Good Video Experience. Only Argentina shares the accolade of offering our users Good Video Experience via any operator in South America.

Although the three Uruguayan operators fall under the same Video Experience ranking, that does not mean they are identical in our metrics. While our users on Claro saw a score of 55.9 (out of 100), bordering the low end of the Good category, our users on Antel scored 63.6 — just 1.4 points away from a Very Good Video Experience across both 3G and 4G.

Opensignal recently developed a measurement for Voice App Experience, which uses a model derived from an International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality. Applying this model to our Uruguay users shows a surprisingly close range of scores across the three competing operators, hovering around the Acceptable range of 75-80. In fact, our results were so close for Claro and Antel that they statistically count as a draw, despite their mean values falling in different categories.

Movistar is teetering on the edge of an Acceptable Voice App Experience score. But its overall score is dragged down by the relatively poorer 3G Voice App Experience, which, at just 67.2 points, is 11% lower than what our 3G users on Antel and Claro saw. At the same time, Movistar’s 4G Voice App Experience score is comparable to what our Antel and Claro users saw on 3G, which further explains Movistar’s Poor overall Voice App Experience score.

If so far the scores between operators have tended to stick close together, a look at Download Speed Experience offers a sobering view. Our users on Antel’s network experienced on average 4G speeds of 22.9 Mbps. By comparison, our users on Movistar and Claro’s networks experienced average 4G download speeds of only 17.4 and 12.4 Mbps respectively. Overall, at 18.4 Mbps, our Antel users achieved speeds 77% faster than on Claro and 34% faster than on Movistar.

We have recently looked at how faster speeds do not necessarily translate to better Video Experience, and our data on Uruguay offers another pertinent example: while Download Speed Experience for Antel users is nearly double that of Claro users, their Video Experience score is just 14% higher, which is not even enough to place them in a higher quality category. This highlights the importance of calculating these metrics using dedicated models rather than just extrapolating from download speed measurements.

Upload speed is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of the user mobile experience with the rise of user-generated content such as photos, audio, and live streamed video. Today, users are more likely to notice a drastic difference in upload speeds than ever before, giving an advantage to our Antel users, who enjoyed 8.5 Mbps in Upload Speed Experience, more than double what our users on Claro’s network saw.

Interestingly, we found that our users on Claro’s 3G network consistently get faster speeds in both download and upload than its two national competitors. On 3G Upload Speed Experience, our Claro users were able to reach an average of 1.4 Mbps, which is double that of our Movistar or Antel users. 3G speeds are likely all the more impactful for Claro, whose users recorded the lowest 4G Availability.

Latency in Uruguay is not as consistent across operators as we've seen in other South American countries. While our Argentinian and Chilean users see just a few milliseconds difference between the best and worst latency, in Uruguay that difference is a staggering 33.2ms. At just 51.1ms nationwide and 42.0ms in Montevideo, we saw our users on Antel's network experience one of the lowest latency scores on the continent. This gives our users on Antel a unique advantage towards enjoying a good gaming experience: a healthy mix of fast download and upload speeds and low latencies.

Once again our users on Claro are showing the same pattern as for speeds, wherein their 3G Latency is much closer to their 4G Latency than it is for the other operators. Antel's 4G Latency Experience is close to half its 3G score, while Movistar's is nearly a third better. By comparison, there were barely 5ms separating both of Claro's scores.