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The average download speeds observed by our users have increased significantly no matter their choice of national operator. The largest improvement was seen by our Orange users who saw their speeds rise by 6.3 Mbps (21.2%), followed by their Proximus counterparts — 2.5 Mbps (6.8%) — with those on Telenet’s network seeing a rise of 2.3 Mbps (5.5%). These increases in speed did not cause the Download Speed Experience award to change hands as Telenet is still the outright winner for this award and it has now been so for three reports in a row.
In our last report, Telenet and Proximus were joint winners for Upload Speed Experience as their scores were statistically tied. This time round, Orange has replaced Telenet thanks to a 1.1 Mbps (9.3%) increase in its score and a drop of 0.8 Mbps (7%) in Telenet’s. Proximus was the last outright winner of the Upload Speed Experience award back in our March 2020 report.
All three of Belgium’s operators’ scores for Voice App Experience have risen by 2-2.5 points since our previous report and this has pushed them into the Good (80-87) category, up from Acceptable (74-80). A Good Voice App Experience means that many users were satisfied, but some experienced minor quality impairments such as clicking sounds or distortion being very occasionally present. The improvements across the board had another effect — the dead heat for the Voice App Experience award in our last report between Orange and Proximus has widened into a three-way statistical tie between all of Belgium’s operators.
After statistically tying with Telenet in our previous report, Proximus has succeeded in claiming the 4G Availability award outright thanks to a 1.9 percentage point increase in its score and a 1.9 percentage point drop in the proportion of time that our Telenet users spent connected to 4G services. Despite this decline all three of Belgium’s operators remained above the 90% mark for 4G Availability.
This time round, all three of the awards for our experiential metrics — Video Experience, Games Experience and Voice App Experience — are in the hands of joint winners. In our September 2020 report, Proximus was the sole winner of our Video Experience award, while Orange won the Games Experience award outright. In our current data collection period, the two operators are joint winners for both awards. In the case of Video Experience, this change was driven by a 0.5 point increase in Orange’s score, while Proximus’ has remained unchanged since our last report.
The Belgium mobile network experience remains highly competitive, with joint winners appearing across four of our award categories — up from the three seen in our last report — and all three operators statistically tying on Voice App Experience. Proximus is the dominant operator as far as our awards table is concerned, but with so many ties much could change in our next report.
Looking at our experiential metrics, our users continued to observe an Excellent (75 or above) Video Experience across all three operators and in contrast to our previous report a Good Voice App Experience (up from Acceptable). On two out of three operators’ networks (Orange and Proximus) our users once again observed a Good Games Experience, while their Telenet counterparts continued to have a Fair one instead.
Back in late January, the long-delayed 5G spectrum auction took a step closer, with the government approving the draft legislation that is required for it to go ahead. However, patience is still required from the operators’ perspective as bidding is not likely to begin until early 2022. In the meantime, they will continue to rely on temporary user rights to spectrum in the 3.6GHz-3.8GHz bands to enable 5G rollouts using new capacity. Once the auctions have taken place, 5G roll outs should accelerate because as part of their new license agreements operators will be obligated to provide 5G coverage to 70% of the Belgian population after one year, rising to 99.5% after two years and 99.8% after six years.
In this report, we’ve analyzed the mobile network experience for Belgium’s three national operators, Orange, Proximus and Telenet, over a 90-day period ending January 29, 2021. Our 5G users contributed to the overall mobile network experience measures covered in this report.
| Mobile Experience Awards Belgium | |||
|---|---|---|---|
March 2021,
Belgium Report
|
O
Orange
|
P
Proximus
|
T
Telenet
|
Video Experience
| |||
Games Experience
| |||
Voice App Experience
| |||
Download Speed Experience
| |||
Upload Speed Experience
| |||
4G Availability
| |||
4G Coverage Experience
| |||
|
Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
March 2021,
Belgium
|
|---|---|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
T
Telenet
|
|
4G Availability
|
P
Proximus
|
|
4G Coverage Experience
|
P
Proximus
|
|
Mobile Experience Awards Draws
|
March 2021, Belgium
|
|---|---|
|
Video Experience
|
O
Orange
P
Proximus
|
|
Games Experience
|
O
Orange
P
Proximus
|
|
Voice App Experience
|
O
Orange
P
Proximus
T
Telenet
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
O
Orange
P
Proximus
|
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
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