Uruguay

Our Uruguayan users continue to enjoy a Very Good Video Experience, regardless of the network they connect to, meaning video streamed to users on these networks exhibited short load times and few interruptions during playback.

That said, our users saw modest declines in Video Experience scores on two out of three networks compared to our previous report of between 2.1 and 2.6 points. Only our Claro users saw an incremental improvement of 1.2 points, as a consequence of which Claro and Movistar were statistically tied for our Video Experience award. Antel was further below at 66.9 points (out of 100).

Our 4G Video Experience measurements were in line with our overall video results — all three operators garnered a Very Good rating, while Movistar users have a very similar 4G Video Experience score to their Claro counterparts, with scores of 73.8 and 72.5 respectively. By contrast, in our 3G Video Experience measurements, our Claro users reported a significantly better Video Experience compared to their Movistar and Antel counterparts. Claro’s 3G Video Experience score of 61 earned a Good rating, while Movistar and Antel placed in the Fair category with scores of 53.9 and 43.4 respectively.

Opensignal’s Video Experience metric quantifies video streaming quality by measuring real-world video streams across a range of content delivery networks, using dedicated video streaming tests, to reflect the true experience of users over an operator’s mobile network. The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account. A Good rating indicates that users enjoyed an acceptable experience when streaming mobile video at lower resolutions, but loading times may have been slow and stalling may have occurred, especially at higher resolutions. And as we descend to the Fair rating, loading times get longer and users encounter more stops and stutters in video streams, most notably at higher resolutions.

Our results show a three-way statistical tie between Antel, Movistar and Claro for Games App Experience. While Claro finished in the Fair rating bracket (65-75 points out of 100), Antel and Movistar narrowly missed the same and placed in the Poor category (40-65).

Opensignal’s Games Experience metric quantifies the experience when playing real-time multiplayer mobile 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. These parameters include latency (round trip time), jitter (variability of latency) and packet loss (the proportion of data packets that never reach their destination). 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, Pro Evolution Soccer and Arena of Valor) played around the world.

In our last report, Movistar and Antel were battling it out for Opensignal's Voice App Experience award, but this time our users on both the networks saw small declines of 0.8 and 1.3 points respectively, while their Claro counterparts reported a slight improvement of 0.8 points. As a result of this, Movistar and Claro became joint winners of our award. Additionally, with scores just below 80 points all three operators have now placed in the Acceptable rating category.

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.

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.

Antel held on to our Download Speed Experience award with a score of 20.9 Mbps, but rivals Movistar and Claro are closing in. Our Antel users reported a decline of 2 Mbps or 8.8 % in overall download speeds, on average, which shrunk Antel’s lead down to 1.5 Mbps (7.5%) from the lead of 4.2 Mbps (22.6%) it commanded over Movistar’s score in the previous report. On the other hand, Movistar’s score grew by 0.7 Mbps, while our Claro users clocked the highest improvement of 4.7 Mbps, elevating their Download Speed Experience score to 17.5 Mbps — a boost of 36.3% since our last report.

When we look at Download Speed Experience by technology, Antel users experienced the fastest 4G Download Speeds of 24.2 Mbps, on average, while Moviestar and Claro followed close behind with scores of 22.8 Mbps and 19.7 Mbps respectively. On the flipside, our Claro users observed the fastest average 3G download speeds with a score of 8.9 Mbps — 3.1 Mbps faster than their counterparts on Movistar and more than twice as fast as Antel’s score of 4.2 Mbps.

Antel held on to our Upload Speed Experience award with our users observing average speeds of 9 Mbp on its network — 1.2-2.1 Mbps faster than the speeds seen by their peers on Movistar and Claro’s network.

While download speeds often receive the most attention, upload speed is becoming increasingly important as consumer mobile habits shift away from mere content consumption to its creation and content sharing on popular social media platforms, which gives operators with the best upload speeds a distinct advantage. And Antel holds that advantage at the moment.

Movistar continues to dominate 4G Availability in Uruguay. The operator once again won the award with an impressive 93.3% and considering there is a limited headspace for improvement it is remarkable that Movistar’s score grew by 0.7 percentage points in the last six months. Having said that, both of its rivals are making strides to close the gap. While Antel's 4G Availability score has grown by 1.5 percentage points to 89.6% since our last report, our Claro users saw the highest growth of 2.6 percentage points bringing the operator’s score to 87.3%.

This is also one of the reasons we are seeing great improvement in Claro’s scores in other metrics. As operators make their 4G services more accessible, consumers can find faster 4G connections more often, which causes the overall mobile network experience to improve. Our 4G Availability metric shows the proportion of time 4G users spent connected to their 4G network. With all three operators’ scoring above 87%, our users in Uruguay, on average, now connect to 4G services more than 87% of the time regardless of their choice of network.

Antel won our 4G Coverage Experience award, with a score of nine points (on a scale of 0-10). Movistar finished second with 8.0, while Claro trailed behind with 7.1 points.

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