Australia

Telstra and Vodafone are the joint winners for Video Experience as the difference between the two operators’ scores — 74.1 and 74.4, respectively — is statistically insignificant. Optus was not that far behind with a score of 73.1 out of 100. Our users across all three operators have observed small declines of 1.3-2.2 points since our last report, with our Vodafone and Optus users at the low and high end of this range, respectively. Given the headwinds of 2020 for operators, this small change indicates the resilience of Australia's mobile network experience. However, the declines have been enough to knock all three operators down from the Excellent (75 and above) rating they all received last time to Very Good (65-75). A Very Good rating indicates that loading times were generally fast and that our users experienced only occasional stalling. However, the experience may have been somewhat inconsistent across users and/or video providers/resolutions.

Opensignal’s Video Experience metric quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's networks. The metric is derived on an International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-based approach, built upon detailed studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters, including picture quality, video loading time and stall rate, with the perceived video experience as reported by real people. To calculate video experience, we are directly measuring video streams from end-user devices and using this ITU approach to quantify the overall video experience for each operator on a scale from 0 to 100. The videos tested include a mixture of resolutions and are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers.

This time around, our Australian users observed no statistically significant difference when playing multiplayer video games over all three operators’ mobile networks. Optus, Telstra and Vodafone are therefore joint winners of the Games Experience award, in contrast to our previous report when it was just Optus and Telstra tying for first place.

While our users have seen declines in their Games Experience since our last report, our Vodafone users saw the smallest drop — 2.7 points versus the 5.9-6.2 point drop seen by their Optus and Telstra counterparts. The lower scores have pushed all three operators down a category for this measure of the mobile experience — from Good (75-85) to Fair (65-75).

A Fair Games Experience indicates that our users found the experience “average”. In most cases the game was responsive to the actions of the player with most users reporting that they felt like they had control over the game. The majority of players reported that they noticed a delay between their actions and the outcomes in the game.

The Games Experience metric quantifies the experience when playing real-time multiplayer games on mobile devices connected to servers located around the world. The approach is built on several years of research quantifying the relationship between technical network parameters and the gaming experience as reported by real mobile users. Additionally, it considers multiple genres of multiplayer mobile games to measure the average sensitivity to network conditions. The games tested include some of the most popular real-time multiplayer mobile games — such as Fortnite, Minecraft and PUBG — played around the world.

Telstra has won our Voice App Experience award for the third report in a row, this time with a score of 80.5 points, putting it ahead of its rivals by at least 0.5 points and this margin of victory has remained essentially unchanged. However, our users across all three operators have seen their Voice App Experience deteriorate slightly since our last report, with both Telstra and Optus’s scores falling by 1.1 points, while Vodafone’s score dropped by only half a point. This has caused both Optus and Vodafone to drop down a category — from Good (80-87) to Acceptable (74-80), leaving Telstra as the sole Australian operator with a Good rating for this measure of the mobile experience.

The difference between a Good Voice App Experience rating and an Acceptable one is that more users were satisfied with the former than with the latter and those users who had an Acceptable Voice App Experience were more likely to experience perceptible call quality impairments, such as distortion or clicking sounds of short duration.

Opensignal's Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger etc. — using a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters. This model characterizes the exact relationship between the technical measurements and perceived call quality.

This is the fifth report in a row in which Telstra has won our Download Speed Experience award. This time round, Telstra clocked up a Download Speed Experience score of 45.3 Mbps, which was at least 7.7 Mbps (20.5%) higher than the scores of its rivals. The gap in Download Speed Experience scores between Telstra and its fellow Australian operators has grown by 2 Mbps since our last report, when the difference was at least 5.7 Mbps (13.8%). This is because Optus — the operator that came second in our last report — saw its score drop by 4.7 Mbps (11.2%), while our Telstra users saw their average overall download speeds drop by 2 Mbps (4.3%). Our Vodafone users were the only ones to see an improvement in their overall speeds, which rose on average by 1.6 Mbps (4.3%).

When we break down the user experience by mobile network technology generation, Optus’s 3G Download Speed score remained unchanged from our last report, while Telstra’s fell by 0.2 Mbps (4.2%) and Vodafone’s rose by 0.4 Mbps (7.4%). Switching to 4G Download Speed, Optus’s score dropped by 5.1 Mbps (11.7%), Telstra’s fell by 2.3 Mbps (4.6%), while Vodafone’s increased by 1.2 Mbps (3.2%).

Telstra and Vodafone remain joint winners for the Upload Speed Experience award, with scores of 9.6-9.7 Mbps. Our users have observed slower average overall upload speeds across all three operators since our last report, with our Optus users seeing the largest decline — 0.7 Mbps (8%) — with their speeds falling to 8 Mbps and our Vodafone users saw the smallest dip — 0.1 Mbps (0.5%).

Looking at 3G and 4G upload speeds individually, Telstra and Vodafone were again statistically tied for the fastest 4G Upload Speed score, while our Vodafone users observed the highest 3G Upload Speed score — 1.7 Mbps. 3G upload speeds were more resilient than their 4G equivalents, with our Vodafone users seeing a 0.4 Mbps (28%) increase while Optus and Telstra’s increased by 0.2 and 0.1 Mbps, respectively. The declines in 4G Upload Speed scores were generally in line with those for the overall Upload Speed Experience, but were worse by 0.1 Mbps across all three operators.

Optus has now won our 4G Availability award for the second report in a row and the operator has now joined the select club of operators with 4G Availability scores in excess of 95%. All of our users, regardless of their choice of operator, spent a greater proportion of their time on average connected to 4G services than in our previous report, with 4G Availability scores rising across all three operators. Our Telstra users saw the largest increase — 0.6 percentage points to hit 94.1% — closely followed by their Vodafone counterparts (0.5 percentage points, resulting in a score of 93.9%). Our Optus users saw the smallest improvement with a gain of 0.2 percentage points, but the operator still ended up in the lead with a score of 95.1%. Given that all three operators had scores well above 90% in our last report, these modest gains are to be expected given the limited room for improvement.

Our 4G Availability metric shows the proportion of time users with a 4G device and subscription have an LTE connection. When we report an average 4G availability of 75%, that means our LTE users were, on average, connected to LTE services on their network 75% of the time. Availability is not a measure of coverage or the geographic extent of a network. It won’t tell you whether you are likely to get coverage if you plan to visit a far flung region that is off the beaten track. Instead, it measures what proportion of time people have a network connection, in the places they most commonly frequent, something often missed by traditional coverage metrics.

4G Coverage Experience scores have barely shifted since our previous report, which means that Telstra has again won our award for this measure of the mobile experience with a score of 9.7 out of 10, while Optus placed second with a score of 9.1 and Vodafone came last with a score of 7.9.

Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator’s network. It analyzes the locations where customers of a network operator received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by users of all network operators.

In simple terms,4G Coverage Experience measures the mobile coverage experience in all the locations that matter most to everyday users — i.e.all the places where they live, work and travel. It considers all the areas that Opensignal users visit, the portion of locations that 4G is available to them, and locations that more users visit have higher importance to them.