Colombia

Over the last few reports we saw modest improvements in the Video Experience scores of all three national operators in Colombia. But this time around all carriers made huge strides to advance from Fair (40-55) to Good Video Experience rating (55-65 on our 100-point scale). While Movistar kept its lead and won our national award in this category with a score of 59.9 points, Claro became the biggest gainer in this category with 58.2 points — an improvement of 7.2 points in six months. Tigo also bettered its score by more than four points to score 55.3 points.

With all three operators achieving a Good rating, Colombia has taken a great leap forward in our Video Experience metric. This means that our users in the country now enjoy shorter load-times and less frequent interruptions while streaming videos on their smartphones. This was also reflected in our recent State of Mobile Video Experience report.

In this report, we quantified the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile operator networks in Colombia. While all three operators challenged each other, Tigo became the first operator to win our inaugural award with a score of 72.3 (on a scale of 100).

We saw intense competition in this category, with less than four points separating all three operators. However, each one of them scored between 68 and 74 to end up with a Poor rating, which means our users experience frequent distortion, clicking sounds or silence during the call.

We recorded the biggest gains on Claro's network as our users enjoyed the fastest Download Speed Experience of 14.1 Mbps on its network. Claro users' overall download speed increased by more than 4 Mbps to overtake Tigo’s score of 12.5 Mbps. Movistar remained in last place at 11.6 Mbps with only a small improvement.

When we split Download Speed Experience by technology, Claro remains the fastest at 19.3 Mbps in our 4G Download Speed measurements with an improvement of more than 4.5 Mbps, followed by Tigo and Movistar at 17.5 Mbps and 15.6 Mbps respectively. We saw little improvement in our 3G Download Speed measurements. This further signifies that Colombian operators are currently focusing more on 4G experience than on 3G networks.

Claro challenged Movistar to win our Upload Speed Experience award with a score of 6 Mbps. All three operators’ Upload Speed Experience scores increased since our last report, but no individual gain from Movistar or Tigo was enough to catch up with Claro’s winning score that increased by more than 70% in six months.

With an increase in the use of social media applications, Upload Speed Experience is becoming an even more important aspect of user’s mobile network experience and at present Claro holds a clear advantage.

Movistar kept hold of our award in Latency Experience, as our users on its network enjoyed the fastest network response time of 57.9 milliseconds. While Tigo missed the first place by a difference of almost 3ms, Claro remained further behind with a score of 67.2ms. We saw all three operators improve their network responsiveness since the last report, with our users on Tigo’s network experiencing the greatest improvement of 6.5ms.

Looking at Latency Experience by technology, in our 4G Latency measurements, Tigo clocked the quickest response time of 44ms on average, followed by Movistar and Claro at 56.1ms and 59.1ms. In our 3G Latency measurements, Movistar was the only operator to score below 90ms.

Latency is a metric often overlooked, but it affects the mobile data experience in many subtle ways. Especially as user habits shift towards data-hungry applications like video streaming, live chat, and online multiplayer gaming.

Over the last two reports, two operators were deadlocked in our 4G Availability category, but this time we have an undisputed winner. With steady improvements, Claro swept away our 4G Availability award, increasing its score by over 5 percentage points to reach 79%. This means, on average our users on Claro’s network were connected to 4G services on their network 79% of the time. Meanwhile, our users on Movistar and Tigo also saw improvements in 4G Availability and were less than two percentage points behind the winning score.

At present, a significant portion of Colombia’s population dwells in rural areas depending heavily on 2G and 3G services. But with the recent auction of new spectrum bands and plans to update 2G and 3G networks to 4G, Colombian users will be able to access 4G services much more easily.

Claro won our 4G Coverage award, with a score of 5.6 (on a scale of 10), while Movistar and Tigo trailed behind closely with 4.6 and 4.2 points respectively. Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how Opensignal’s mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-10, it analyzes the locations where customers of a network operator receive a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by Opensignal users of all network operators.