Brazil

Over the last six months, we have seen impressive improvements in Brazil’s Video Experience. Our users on two out of four national networks, TIM and Claro, observed a Very Good Video Experience — up from the Good ratings seen on our last report. This indicates that our users on these networks saw generally fast loading times and very occasional stalling while streaming videos on their smartphones. Claro kept our Video Experience award with a score of 68.7 points; its lead over second-placed TIM has doubled since the last report, increasing to 3.6 points — up from 1.8 points, as its score grew by 7.1 points. TIM’s score also grew, it rose by 5.3 points, resulting in a score of 65.1 points.

On the other hand, Oi caught up with Vivo with a Good rating: its score grew by 5.8 points in the last six months, which was good enough to upgrade its Video Experience ratings from Fair. Vivo’s score also improved by 3.9 points to finish with a score of 63.2 on a 0-100 scale. A Good rating means that our users enjoyed an acceptable experience when streaming mobile video at lower resolutions, but loading times could still be slow and stalling was not uncommon, especially at higher resolutions.

In our analysis of Video Experience on 4G networks only, Claro achieved our highest rating of Excellent with 75.5 points — an improvement of 4.7 points in the past six months. An Excellent Video Experience is a great feat, meaning users on Claro’s 4G network enjoyed fast load times and practically non-existent stalling on all resolutions and video streaming providers tested. TIM and Vivo continued to be rated Very Good, while Oi was less than one point shy of earning the same.

Claro won our first-ever Games Experience award in Brazil. The operator’s winning score of 70 points (out of 100) was significantly better than that of its peers — more than 10 points ahead of its closest rival TIM (59.9) — placing it in the Fair rating category. Vivo and Oi were further behind with scores of 49.1 and 42.1, respectively, and placed in the Poor category along with TIM.

A Fair rating means most users deemed the experience “average”; it also indicates that the gameplay experience was generally controllable, with the majority of users noticing a delay between their actions and the outcomes in the game. In contrast, a Poor rating indicates that the experience was less enjoyable, as users observed increased delays and lack of controllability in gameplay.

Our Games Experience metric measures real-world mobile network conditions to assess the mobile multiplayer games experience perceived by our users on different cellular networks. Measured on a scale of 0-100, it analyzes how the multiplayer mobile Games Experience is affected by mobile network conditions including UDP latency, packet loss and jitter. Additionally, it considers multiple genres of multiplayer mobile games — to measure the average sensitivity to network conditions — such as Battle Royale and MOBA games of which PUBG, Fortnite and Arena of Valor are examples.

Once again our users in Brazil enjoyed the best Voice App Experience on Claro’s network. The operator won our award with an Acceptable rating — its score of 79.3 was less than one point short of achieving a Good rating. We saw a close competition in this category between the remaining three operators, with less than three points separating their scores. While TIM like Claro has once again placed in the Acceptable rating bracket with a score of 75, Vivo joined Oi in the Poor category with a score of 73.6, meaning our Vivo users have likely suffered from increased quality impairments.

An Acceptable rating means users were satisfied with the quality of the call and were generally able to comprehend without repetition, while some may have suffered from perceptible call quality impairments such as clicking sounds or distortion. Likewise, a Poor rating means many users were dissatisfied and likely suffered from increased call quality impairments.

Our Voice App Experience metric quantifies the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile networks. It ranks operators on a scale of 0-100 using a mean opinion score (MOS) model derived from an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters such as UDP latency and UDP packet-loss.

Claro remains the unchallenged winner on Download Speed Experience. Our users on its networks observed the fastest average download speeds (23.4 Mbps), on average — more than 50% faster than the speeds experienced by their Vivo counterparts (15.6 Mbps). Since our last report, we have seen some decent improvements across all four networks: while Claro users observed an improvement of 2 Mbps, their counterparts on TIM and Oi saw their download speeds grow by1.6 Mbps and 1.3 Mbps, respectively. Meanwhile our Vivo users saw the smallest improvement of 0.5 Mbps.

Since our last report, the gap between the average download speed observed by our users on Claro’s network (23.4 Mbps) and those on second-placed Vivo (15.6 Mbps) has increased by 1.5 Mbps to 7.8 Mbps. This means that our Claro users on average saw more than 50% faster download speeds than their Vivo counterparts.

Claro held on to our Upload Speed Experience award — our users on its network observed average upload speeds of 8 Mbps — 2.3 Mbps faster than those on that of its closest rival, Vivo. We recorded a close-run race for second place, where Vivo and TIM came nearly neck and neck with a score of 5.7 Mbps and 5.6 Mbps respectively, while Oi was further behind at 4 Mbps.

Upload speeds are typically slower than download speeds, as current mobile broadband technologies tend to be focused on providing the best possible download speeds for users consuming content. But with the increasing use of social media and content sharing upload speeds are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the mobile network experience.

TIM swept away our 4G Availability award with an extraordinary score of 88.2%. This means that our users on TIM’s network, on average, were able to connect to 4G services 88.2% of the time. At the same time, Vivo and Claro’s scores were less than a percentage point below the 80% milestone with scores of 79.5 and 79.0 points respectively, while Oi languished in last place with a score of 70.2%.

4G Availability in Brazil continues to improve, but with the increasing ubiquity of 4G networks the growth has slowly started to stall. However, our users still observed decent improvements in the category on all four networks. Our users on TIM’s network saw the greatest increase of 2.5 percentage points, followed by their counterparts on Vivo and Oi’s networks whose scores grew by 2.2 and 2 percentage points respectively.

TIM won our 4G Coverage Experience award for a second time in a row with a score of 6.3 points. While Vivo was close behind with 6.2 points, Claro and Oi scored 5.8 and 4.5 points respectively.

Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how Opensignal’s users 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 received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by Opensignal users of all network operators.