Introduction
In our first look at the 5G user experience in the Netherlands, KPN has performed strongly — winning three out of seven of our awards outright, including all but one of our 5G speed awards. In addition, KPN jointly wins our 5G Video Experience, Video Experience – 5G Users and Upload Speed Experience – 5G Users awards.
However, it was our T-Mobile users who spent the highest proportion of their time connected to 5G services (20.4%). Despite this advantage, when we analyzed the overall experience of our 5G users weighted by the proportion of time that they spent connected to each generation of mobile network technology, our KPN 5G users still observed the highest average download speeds in our Download Speed Experience – 5G Users award category. In addition, KPN and T-Mobile were statistically tied for both Video Experience – 5G Users (along with Vodafone) and Upload Speed Experience – 5G Users. Given that in our mobile network experience report (which uses the same data collection period) KPN and T-Mobile are joint winners for Download Speed Experience, it is a testament to KPN’s 5G network that it was able to win the Download Speed Experience — 5G Users award outright.
The scores seen by Dutch 5G users are impressive by international standards. The Netherlands placing in the top 10 5G countries for 5G Upload Speed Experience as well as for all three of our experiential metrics as measured on 5G connections — 5G Video Experience, 5G Games Experience and 5G Voice App Experience — along with 5G Availability and 5G Reach (the average proportion of locations where 5G users have connected to a 5G network out of all the locations those users have visited) in our recent “Benchmarking the global 5G experience”t insight.
It’s worth remembering that while 5G services were first launched in the Netherlands at the end of April 2020 by Vodafone — with KPN and T-Mobile following in late July of the same year — the country is still towards the start of its 5G journey, given that spectrum in the 3.5 GHz won’t be auctioned until 1Q 2022. Once operators have deployed the spectrum that will be made available in this auction, the mobile experience of our 5G users will improve significantly.
For the first time, Opensignal presents 5G awards in the Netherlands. We have analyzed our 5G users' experience across four 5G measures: the average speed of the 5G connection when users have an active 5G link — 5G Download Speed and 5G Upload Speed; the time users spend connected to 5G represented by 5G Availability; and the experience our users observed when streaming video over a 5G connection — 5G Video Experience.
We also have assessed our 5G users’ Video Experience, Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience across different generations of mobile technology — we call these measures of the mobile experience Video Experience – 5G Users,
Download Speed Experience – 5G Users and Upload Speed Experience – 5G Users. These combine the average scores that our 5G users experience on 3G or 4G when they are not connected to 5G, with their average 5G scores, based on the amount of time they spend connected to each generation of mobile network technology. Our 5G users have both a 5G smartphone and a 5G plan.
We have also published a companion report — Netherlands Mobile Network Experience March 2021 — which analyzes the overall experience of all our mobile users in the country.