Introduction
In our inaugural country-level report on Russia’s mobile experience we’ve found that when it comes to the performance observed by our users, it’s principally a tale of two national operators: MegaFon and Tele2, as they have won the lion’s share of our awards. The only award to escape their reach was the 4G Coverage Experience award, which was snapped up by MTS. This measures on a scale of 0-10 the locations where customers of a network operator received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by users of all network operators.
MegaFon’s lead was seemingly unassailable on Download Speed Experience, with its users observing an impressive 19.7 Mbps, a whopping 6.5 Mbps faster than the speeds seen by their MTS and Beeline counterparts and 7.8 Mbps faster than the average speeds enjoyed by users on Tele2’s network. That said, MegaFon’s margin of victory was far smaller for the Upload Speed Experience and Video Experience awards.
Tele2 on the other hand was the only operator on which our 4G users spent more than 85% of their time connected to a 4G signal, which allowed it to walk away with the 4G Availability award. It also snapped up the Games Experience and Voice App Experience awards.
Encouragingly, none of Russia’s four national operators is trailing behind the rest of the pack across the majority of our metrics, indicating that there’s healthy competition in terms of the user experience. That said, our results show that there is much work that still needs to be done before Russia’s mobile gamers can play over cellular networks without experiencing gameplay issues.
In this report, we've analyzed our data gathered in the 90 days from the start of February 2020 to see how Russia’s four national operators — MegaFon, Tele2, Beeline and MTS — measure up.