Taiwan

FarEasTone comfortably wins the 5G Availability award with a score of 32.5% ahead of Taiwan Mobile on 20.7%. By comparison, T Star and Chunghwa saw scores of 16.5% and 13.8% respectively.

5G Availability represents the proportion of time where our users had an active 5G connection. A higher score means users are able to enjoy the uplift in mobile experience that 5G provides over older mobile network technologies more of the time. Because it measures time the results are particularly sensitive to the places where users spent most of their day, for example indoors at work or in the home.

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 a signal 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.

5G Reach is the proportion of locations where our users saw a 5G signal compared with the total number of locations that they visited. In simple terms, 5G Reach measures the mobile experience in all the locations that matter most to everyday users — i.e. all the places where they live, work and travel. 5G Reach for each operator is measured on a scale from 0 to 10.

FarEasTone wins the 5G Reach award outright with a score of 5.9 ahead of Taiwan Mobile's score of 5.1. On both operators our users saw 5G present in more than half of the locations they visited.

For the second report in a row, Chunghwa and FarEasTone jointly win the 5G Video Experience award, this time with statistically tied scores of 84.1 and 83.5 respectively on a 100 point scale. However, all four operators rated as Excellent (75 or above). This means users had a very consistent experience across all video streaming providers and resolutions tested, with fast loading times and almost non-existent stalling.

Video Experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over operator networks. It uses an approach derived from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) models, built upon detailed studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters that Opensignal measures at scale from smartphone users — 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-based 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.

The same operators win 5G Games Experience as our 5G mobile video streaming award. Chunghwa and FarEasTone have statistically tied scores of 85.9 and 86.3, respectively. They are the only two operators in Taiwan to rate as Excellent (85 or above). This means that the vast majority of users deemed this network experience to be acceptable. Nearly all users felt like they had control over the game and received immediate feedback on their actions. There was not a noticeable delay in almost all cases.

5G Games Experience analyzes how the multiplayer mobile gaming experience is affected by 5G network conditions that Opensignal measures including latency, packet loss and jitter to determine the impact on gameplay and the overall multiplayer Games Experience. 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. It considers multiple genres of multiplayer mobile games including battle royale — example titles include Garena Freefire or PUBG — and MOBA (massive online battle area) an example of which is Arena of Valor.

5G Voice App Experience is the only award where we see Taiwan Mobile jointly winning. In fact, three operators share this award because Taiwan Mobile's score of 83.5 is statistically tied with Chunghwa's score of 83.9 and also with FarEasTone's score of 83.8.

Opensignal's Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, LINE, 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. Voice App Experience for each operator is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100.

With an average 5G download speed over 100 Mbps faster than the speeds our users experienced on its rivals Chunghwa wins the 5G Download Speed award. Its score of 456.6 Mbps is far ahead of FarEasTone's score of 334.8 Mbps, Taiwan Mobile's 253.7 Mbps and T-Star's 131.9 Mbps.

This is the first time that Chunghwa has won the 5G Download Speed award. In the two previous Opensignal 5G reports for Taiwan, FarEasTone won instead. Our 5G users saw much faster download speeds with 5G technology than the overall Download Speed Experience of all of our users — see the companion Taiwan Mobile Network Experience Report.

Chunghwa also wins the 5G Upload Speed award outright with a score of 60.6 Mbps. Previous joint winner FarEasTone is now in second place with a score of 51 Mbps. However, the other two operators are a long way behind these two leaders with our users on them experiencing much slower average 5G upload speeds of 22.2 Mbps using Taiwan Mobile and 19.6 Mbps on T Star.

A fast upload speed is useful for sharing photos and videos on social media. It also helps reduce the time to download files from cloud services or send large attachments on email or messaging apps.