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Vodafone wins the Video Experience award, scoring 72 points. It achieved a 0.3 points lead on second-placed WindTre — which previously won the award in our November report. However, less than two points separate the four national operators, indicating that the competition for this award is very high.
By edging out WindTre in Opensignal’s measure of Video Experience, Vodafone is now the sole winner of all three experiential awards that measure users’ mobile experience with different types of services on their smartphones: Video Experience, Games Experience and Voice App Experience.
All four operators showed improvements to their 4G Availability scores in the past six months, and Iliad notably topped the 90% mark in 4G Availability for the first time — the last operator to achieve this feat in Italy. This means that our 4G users on all four operators were able to connect to 4G services more than 90% of the time. Vodafone is the winner of the 4G Availability award and it saw the largest improvement in 4G Availability since our previous report.
WindTre was the only operator in Italy to score above the 30 Mbps threshold in Download Speed Experience, and above the 10 Mbps mark in Upload Speed Experience. While WindTre still holds a considerable lead over its competitors on both metrics, other operators managed to substantially reduce the gap, compared to our previous report.
In our last few reports, TIM has seemingly been driving in a different gear compared to the other Italian mobile operators. Just three reports ago, TIM used to dominate our awards table, but while our users’ mobile experience on other operators has improved, the experience using TIM has fallen behind. In this report, TIM secures a single joint win in 4G Coverage Experience with Vodafone, replicating its result in our last report when TIM shared that award with Vodafone and WindTre.
In the last six months Italy’s mobile experience has generally improved as we have seen positive changes across all our seven categories for all four operators — except for Iliad’s Upload Speed Experience score that did not change compared to our November report.
While most Opensignal awards featured the same winner as in the last report, this time Vodafone made the news by winning the Video Experience award after ranking in third-place one year ago and second-place in the last report.
This report provides an additional example to why measuring networks’ speeds alone is not enough to understand the full spectrum of users’ mobile experience. In fact, while WindTre wins both of our speed measures — Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience — Vodafone is the winner of all three Experiential awards: Video Experience, Games Experience and Voice App Experience.
Italian mobile operators continue to roll out their 5G networks. After launching its 5G service in the last quarter of 2020, WindTre reported it now covers more than 90% of the population with 5G using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) technology that enables it to operate with 4G and 5G simultaneously. Vodafone and TIM have focused on rolling out 5G across major Italian cities since they first deployed in June 2019. While Vodafone recently announced it provides 5G services in 25 cities, TIM reported it will expand its 5G offering to more than 20 cities by the year’s end. Iliad was the fourth Italian mobile operator to launch 5G in December 2020, now available in areas across numerous cities.
As 5G gains traction, operators are looking to switch off their 3G networks and repurpose the existing spectrum from 3G services to 4G and 5G services. TIM plans to cease offering 3G services next year while Vodafone switched off 3G during the first quarter of 2021.
In this report we have looked at the 90-day data period beginning January 1, 2021 and ending March 31, 2021, and measured the user experience across all our key metrics for Italy’s four leading operators — Iliad, TIM, Vodafone and WindTre — both at a national level and across the country’s six macro regions. We have used 5G measurements in addition to those from previous generations of mobile network technology when determining the overall scores for each award category.
| Mobile Experience Awards Italy | ||||
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May 2021,
Italy Report
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I
Iliad
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T
TIM
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V
Vodafone
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W
WindTre
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Video Experience
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Games Experience
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Voice App Experience
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Download Speed Experience
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Upload Speed Experience
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4G Availability
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4G Coverage Experience
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Mobile Experience Awards Winners
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May 2021,
Italy
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|---|---|
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Video Experience
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V
Vodafone
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Games Experience
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V
Vodafone
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Voice App Experience
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V
Vodafone
|
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Download Speed Experience
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W
WindTre
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Upload Speed Experience
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W
WindTre
|
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4G Availability
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V
Vodafone
|
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Mobile Experience Awards Draws
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May 2021, Italy
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|---|---|
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4G Coverage Experience
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T
TIM
V
Vodafone
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Vodafone’s Video Experience score increased by three points from the previous report to reach 72 points. That was just enough for Vodafone to push ahead and win the award with a 0.3 points lead over second-placed WindTre. Interestingly, in the November report the roles were reversed as WindTre won the award with a 0.5 lead on then second-placed Vodafone. This time, all operators saw their scores improve by 1.6-3.5 points, while in our previous report we observed some very limited declines across all fours operators compared to the report six months before it.
Competition for this award is getting tougher, with 1.8 points (out of 100) separating the four Italian mobile operators — down from 2.5 points last time — and all of them landing in the Very Good (65-75) Video Experience category.
Vodafone keeps hold of our Games Experience award with a score of 71.4 points, but its lead on second-placed TIM decreased from 2.2 points in our previous report to 1.9 points. TIM scored 69.5 points, while WindTre and Iliad scored 65.4 and 65.1 points, respectively. In this report Iliad joined the other mobile operators in the Fair (65-75) category for Games Experience after rating Poor (40-65) in our last report.
Opensignal's Games Experience measures real-world mobile network conditions to assess the mobile multiplayer games experience felt by users on different networks and scores it on a 0-to-100-point scale. 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 and Arena of Valor — played around the world.
Vodafone wins our Voice App Experience award for the third time in a row, although its lead on the competitors reduced from 0.5 points to 0.3 points. In fact, operators who previously lagged behind in this category have made more substantial improvements this time, which resulted in the four operators' scores placing within 0.6 points — down from1.7 points in our previous report. In particular, our users on Iliad saw good progress in mobile experience with an improvement of 1.9 points compared to the previous report. This increase helped Iliad to move from the last place to second place, now jointly held with TIM.
Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger — using a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union for quantifying overall voice call quality with a series of calibrated technical parameters.
WindTre keeps hold of our Download Speed Experience award, as it was the only Italian operator to score above the 30 Mbps mark. However, in contrast to our previous report, where WindTre recorded an impressive improvement of 4.8 Mbps, this time our users on WindTre saw a more modest increase by 0.6 Mbps and reached 30.7 Mbps. Iliad, on the other hand, continued its steady upwards trend we have been observing since we first reported on the operator in October 2018 as users experienced an increase of 3 Mbps. Iliad is now in second place having scored 27.2 Mbps which is 0.3 Mbps ahead of third-placed Vodafone. TIM’s Download Speed Experience score reached 24.4 Mbps which represents an 0.4 Mbps improvement compared to its score in the last report.
WindTre wins the Upload Speed Experience award with a score of 10.5 Mbps, an increase of 0.7 Mbps compared to our previous report. Vodafone has made an impressive 1.8 Mbps (25.7%) improvement since last time, as its Upload Speed Experience reached 9 Mbps, topping TIM’s 8.7 Mbps. This time we did not observe any significant change in Iliad’s Upload Speed Experience, as the operator scored 6.9 Mbps, which was the same as in the previous report.
Vodafone saw the largest improvement in 4G Availability — with our users seeing an increase of 3.7 percentage points in the time connected to 4G since the last report, partly due to the operator switching off its 3G network. As a result, Vodafone keeps hold of the 4G Availability award with a score of 96.0%. Iliad notably recorded a significant increase of 3.5 percentage points, and was the last Italian mobile operator to exceed the 90% mark in 4G Availability. WindTre and TIM also recorded 0.6-1.2 percentage points improvements and scored 90.9% and 91.5%, respectively.
All four operators have seen their 4G Coverage Experience scores increase since the last report. Iliad showed the largest improvement of 0.3 points, although it is still one point behind the joint winners TIM and Vodafone, who both scored 9.6 points (on a scale of 0-10). In this report, WindTre’s score of 9.5 points was not enough to join TIM and Vodafone in sharing first place — unlike last time when these three operators all jointly won the 4G Coverage Experience award.
Opensignal's 4G Coverage Experience is a measure of how Opensignal's 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.
In our analysis of Italy's six macro regions we saw fierce competition between Vodafone and WindTre. Out of the 36 awards that were up for the taking in total, Vodafone and WindTre win 16 awards and 13 awards outright, respectively; TIM is the sole winner of just one regional award, while the remaining six awards are shared by one or more winners.
Vodafone wins Video Experience awards outright in Central, Sicily and South, while WindTre wins in North East and North West. Vodafone and TIM share the first prize in Sardinia. Despite Vodafone winning the Video Experience award at the national level and collecting half of the regional awards, it was WindTre that recorded the highest Video Experience score in the North East, the only Excellent score (75 points and above) we observed across any region.
Vodafone and TIM are the two main winners in our other two experiential metrics. Vodafone wins four Games Experience regional awards outright and shares the win with TIM in the remaining two regions — North West and Sardinia. Vodafone also wins Voice App Experience in three regions outright, and shares the win in other two regions, while TIM wins outright in North West.
Vodafone wins all six 4G Availability awards, with a 2.8-5.2 percentage points lead. Vodafone was the only operator to exceed the 95% mark in 4G Availability, as it topped that threshold across all geographies except for the Central region. While Iliad, TIM and WindTre all passed the 90% mark at the national level in 4G Availability, all three operators are still seeing two to three regions where our users’ experience did not exceed that threshold.
WindTre dominated in our regional table in both Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience, by winning outright 11 out of the total 12 awards available, and sharing the win with Vodafone in the remaining one. It was our WindTre users in the North East that experienced the fastest Download Speed Experience we recorded across the six regions — 39.7 Mbps.
The North East was also the only region where Iliad and Vodafone scored higher than 30 Mbps, as their Download Speed Experience was 33.1 Mbps and 33.2 Mbps, respectively. We recorded the fastest Upload Speed Experience score of 12.1 Mbps on WindTre’s network in the North East, and WindTre scored higher than 10 Mbps also in the North West and Sicily. TIM was the only other operator to exceed the 10 Mbps threshold in Upload Speed Experience, in the North West.
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