Switzerland

When it comes to delivering video over a smartphone, one operator continues to stand out in Switzerland. Once again, Swisscom won our Video Experience award and maintained an Excellent rating (75 and above) with a score of 78.1 on a 100-point scale. Meanwhile, Sunrise and Salt just missed the same category — by 0.3 and 1.2 points respectively — and ended up in the Very Good category.

An Excellent rating means users enjoy a very consistent experience across all video streaming providers and resolutions, with fast loading times and almost non-existent stalling.

Looking at Video Experience on 4G networks only, all three operators earned Excellent ratings. While Swisscom was less than a point shy of reaching the 80 points mark, Sunrise and Salt were statistically tied for the next place.

In this report, we took a first look at the mobile gaming experience in Switzerland at the operator level. Our newly released Games Experience metric measures real-world mobile network conditions to assess the mobile multiplayer games experience felt by users on different networks, and scores it on a 100-point point scale. It considers multiple genres of multiplayer mobile games to measure the average sensitivity to network conditions. The game types tested include some of the most popular real-time multiplayer mobile gaming genres of which Fortnite, PUBG, and Brawl Stars are examples.

We saw two operators — Sunrise and Salt — come almost neck-and-neck in our measurements, but Swisscom won our first Games Experience award with a score of 85.1 to achieve an Excellent rating (85 and above), making it the first operator to gain an Excellent rating in one of our country reports. Salt followed the winner closely, separated by less than a point (84.5) to finish second, while Sunrise was significantly behind at 76.6. With scores in the 75-85 range, both Salt and Sunrise earned a Good rating. An Excellent rating means the gameplay experience is controllable, with users receiving immediate feedback on their actions without noticeable delay. As we descend the ratings, users’ control over their gameplay declines, and they encounter more delays between their actions and the outcomes in the game.

The use of over-the-top (OTT) voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger has become more popular thanks to ubiquitous data coverage. Opensignal measured the quality of our users’ experience on these apps by using a 100-point scale model, which is derived from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-based approach for quantifying overall voice quality.

We continue to see fierce competition in Switzerland’s Voice App Experience as Swisscom and Salt remain statistically tied for this award. While both of these two operators maintained a Good rating (80-87), Sunrise was just a point shy of achieving the same rating and ended up in the Acceptable category.

A Good rating means our users were largely satisfied with voice app calls, although some experienced minor quality impairments, such as a hazy background, low volume, and very occasional clicking sounds or distortion. An Acceptable rating indicates that these call quality impairments are more perceptible during a call, which can be annoying for users.

Once again our users in Switzerland enjoyed the fastest download speeds on Swisscom’s network. The operator retained our Download Speed Experience award with an outstandingly superior score of 49.6 Mbps — 45% faster than its closest competitor Sunrise’s score of 34.2 Mbps, and 54.2% faster than Salt’s score of 32.2 Mbps.

When evaluating Switzerland’s 4G Download Speeds exclusively, Swisscom continues to be the only operator whose users have surpassed the 50 Mbps mark, with a score of 52.3 Mbps — more than 16 Mbps ahead of both its rivals.

With the increasing use of social media and content sharing, mobile users are not just consuming content but are also creating content. This means that upload speeds have become an increasingly important aspect of the mobile network experience.

Swisscom moved further ahead of the pack in Upload Speed Experience with users on its network experiencing uplink speeds of 18.3 Mbps, on average. Salt finished second, with a significantly lower score of 14.2 Mbps, followed by Sunrise at 13.3 Mbps — 28.8% and 38% lower than Swisscom’s winning score.

We saw a very slight improvement in this category from all three operators (0.9 to 1.2 percentage points), and it’s common to see the growth starting to stall in our measurements once an operator crosses the 85% mark.

For the second report in a row, Swisscom and Sunrise ended up in a statistical tie for our 4G Availability award, with scores above 94%. This means that 4G users on both the networks, on average, are now able to connect to 4G services more than 94% of the time. On the other hand, Salt is within half a percentage point of the 90% mark and if it continues to progress with the current pace, we should see our users on all three of Switzerland's operators enjoying over 90% 4G Availability in the next report.

Switzerland's high 4G Availability scores are particularly impressive, given the topographical challenges the operators face in this mountainous region. And our data shows there is no large divide in mobile experience across the geographical regions, suggesting that the majority of Swiss users will benefit from the growing 5G network, regardless of where they live in the mountainous landscape.

Swisscom was the winner in Opensignal’s first-ever 4G Coverage Experience in Switzerland with a score of 9.8 on a scale of 1-10. Sunrise came in second with a score of 9.5 and Salt came in third with a score of 9.1.

TThe 4G Coverage Experience metric measures how mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator’s network in all the locations that matter to everyday users, such as where they live, work and travel.