Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
In the previous report T-Mobile shared the top spot for Download Speed Experience with Orange. This time, T-Mobile pulls ahead of its competitor and wins the award outright, with a score of 33.3Mbps, due to an increase of 1.4Mbps since the last report. Orange and Play are in a statistical tie for second place, around 2.4Mbps behind the winner. Plus brings up the rear with a score of 26.8Mbps — but our users on this network observe the largest increase in average overall download speeds in Poland since the previous report — 2.9Mbps.
We observed a three-way statistical tie between Orange, Play, and T-Mobile for the Upload Speed Experience award in the previous report. However, Play breaks out of this tie and claims the award all to itself, as our Play users enjoy the highest boost in their average overall upload speeds, of 1.6Mbps. Other Polish operators also observe significant improvements in their Upload Speed Experience scores, ranging from 0.6Mbps for T-Mobile to 0.9Mbps for Orange.
After winning Video Experience and Voice App Experience jointly with T-Mobile and Games Experience outright in the previous report, this time Orange takes home all three experiential awards for overall user experience. All Polish operators place in the Good (58-68) category for Video Experience, Fair (65-75) for Games Experience, and Acceptable (74-80) for Voice App Experience. However, we observe a tight race for 5G experiential awards — 5G Video Experience, 5G Games Experience, and 5G Voice App Experience — resulting in three four-way statistical ties between all Polish operators.
Plus and T-Mobile shared 5G Availability in the previous report — but this time, Plus wins the award outright with a score of 19.1%. This means our Plus 5G users with an active 5G subscription connect to 5G services for nearly a fifth of their time. Plus’s 5G Availability score has risen by 5.1 percentage points, while T-Mobile’s — by 4.2 percentage points. Meanwhile, Orange and Play’s 5G Availability scores remain statistically unchanged.
T-Mobile breaks out of the two statistical ties it was in with Orange for consistency awards and wins both Excellent Consistent Quality (HD video, group video conference calls, and gaming) and Core Consistent Quality (lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls, and web browsing) outright, with scores of 81.6% and 92%, respectively. These scores reflect the percentage of users’ tests in which the operator met the minimum recommended performance thresholds. T-Mobile beats Orange by one percentage point for Excellent Consistent Quality and 0.8 percentage points for Core Consistent Quality. Play comes third for both awards, while Plus — fourth.
Plus wins 5G Download Speed for the fourth time in a row, with a score of 113.1Mbps — more than twice as fast as other Polish operators, which are all in a three-way statistical tie for second place. Plus remains the only winner of this award since Opensignal first introduced it to Polish reports in November 2021 — however, our users on this network observe 8.6Mbps slower speeds than in the previous report.
In Opensignal's latest Poland Mobile Network Experience report, we observe several changes in the awards table since the November 2022 report, as Polish operators claim nine awards outright, compared to only three previously.
Orange leads with three outright and five shared victories — it scores an overall experiential hat-trick with Video Experience, Games Experience, and Voice App Experience. T-Mobile breaks out of statistical ties for Download Speed Experience and both consistency awards and shares three more awards. Plus is the sole winner for 5G Availability and retains its 5G Download Speed Experience award, while Play comes first for Upload Speed Experience. All four Polish operators are in a tie for the three 5G experiential awards, while Orange and Play jointly win Availability and 5G Upload Speed on top of that.
Poland is yet to auction the 3.5GHz band — and our recent analysis shows that due to the delay in assigning this band to mobile operators, the Polish 5G experience lags behind other markets in the Central and Eastern Europe. There is likely to be a long-awaited breakthrough in this process, as the Polish telecommunications regulator opened the second round of consultations in April 2023, with the spectrum auction planned for Q42023. The current proposal includes auctioning four 100MHz blocks as requested by Polish operators, instead of the initially offered 80MHz, at the same reserve price of PLN450 million (around $107.2 million) — the additional spectrum was initially planned for private networks, but UKE will assign frequencies to them in a different band. More spectrum in the 3.5GHz band available to mobile operators will bolster the 5G experience for Polish users.
Our results in this report are based on measurements collected across all major mobile operators in Poland – Orange, Play, Plus, and T-Mobile – over the period of 90 days between February 1, 2023 and May 1, 2023, to see how they fared.
In the previous report, Orange and T-Mobile shared the winners’ podium for Video Experience. This time, however, Orange claims the top spot outright, with a score of 64.6 points on a 100-point scale — 1.5-1.8 points ahead of Play and T-Mobile which are in a statistical tie for second place. Plus brings up the rear with a score of 58.9 points.
All Polish operators place in the Good (58-68) category for Video Experience. This means our users are, on average, able to stream video at 720p or better with satisfactory loading times and little stalling.
Video Experience scores account for adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), a technology that allows Opensignal to accurately represent users’ real video experience including video streams up to 4K quality.
Opensignal’s Video Experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's networks. The metric is based on an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approach, built upon detailed studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters, 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 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 — including Full HD (FHD) and 4K / Ultra HD (UHD) — and are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers.
In addition to Video Experience, we report on the following metrics related to video experience:
Orange wins Games Experience outright for the third time in a row — this time with a score of 72.4 points on a 100-point scale. Play is the runner-up, two points behind the winner, while Plus and T-Mobile jointly take third place, with scores of 67.0-68.3 points. All four operators rate as Fair (65-75) — users found the experience to be ‘average’ and the majority of players report that they notice a delay between their actions and the outcomes in the game.
Opensignal’s Games Experience measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-100, it analyzes how our users’ multiplayer mobile gaming experience is affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter.
Games Experience 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.
Calculating Games Experience starts with measuring the end-to-end experience from users’ devices to internet end-points that host real games. The score is then measured on a scale from 0 to 100.
In addition to Games Experience, we report on the following metrics related to games experience:
After jointly winning Voice App Experience with T-Mobile in the previous report, Orange claims it all to itself this time around, with a score of 79.7 points on a 100-point scale. Play and T-Mobile are statistically tied for second place, around 1.1 points behind Orange, while Plus brings up the rear with a score of 77.8 points.
Opensignal's 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 (ITU) 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.
In addition to Voice App Experience, we report on the following metrics related to voice app experience:
Previously, T-Mobile jointly won Download Speed Experience with Orange. This time, T-Mobile pulls ahead of its competitor and claims the award all to itself, with a score of 33.3Mbps, due to an increase of 1.4Mbps since the last report. Orange and Play are in a statistical tie for second place, around 2.4Mbps behind the winner. Plus brings up the rear with a score of 26.8Mbps — but our users on this network observe the largest increase in average overall download speeds in Poland since the previous report, of 2.9Mbps.
Measured in Mbps, Download Speed Experience represents the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across an operator’s mobile data networks.
In addition to Download Speed Experience, we report on the following metrics related to download speeds:
In the previous report, Orange, Play, and T-Mobile were all joint winners for Upload Speed Experience. However, Play breaks out of this tie and wins the award outright, as our Play users enjoy the highest boost in their average overall upload speeds, of 1.6Mbps. Other Polish operators also observe significant improvements in their Upload Speed Experience scores, ranging from 0.6Mbps for T-Mobile to 0.9Mbps for Orange.
Upload Speed Experience measures the average upload speeds for each operator observed by our users across their mobile data networks. Typically upload speeds are slower than download speeds, as current mobile broadband technologies focus resources on providing the best possible download speed for users consuming content on their devices. As mobile internet trends move away from downloading content to creating content and supporting real-time communications services, upload speeds are becoming more vital and new technologies are emerging that boost upstream capacity.
In addition to Upload Speed Experience, we report on five supporting metrics related to upload speeds:
In the previous report, Plus was the sole winner for 5G Video Experience. This time, however, our Polish users observe no statistically significant differences between Polish operators in terms of 5G Video Experience and as a result, all four make it to the winners’ podium for this category, with scores of 73.2-73.9 points on a 100-point scale. They all rate as Very Good (68-78), a category higher than they do for Video Experience. The Very Good rating means our users are, on average, able to stream video at 1080p or better with satisfactory loading times and little stalling.
Video Experience scores account for adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), a technology that allows Opensignal to accurately represent users’ real video experience including video streams up to 4K quality.
5G Video Experience quantifies the quality of mobile video experienced by Opensignal users on real-world video streams when they were connected to 5G. The metric is based on an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approach, built upon detailed studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters, including picture quality, video loading time and stall rate, with the perceived video experience as reported by real people. To calculate 5G Video Experience, we are directly measuring video streams from end-user devices and using this ITU approach to quantify the video experience observed by our users on each operator’s 5G network on a scale from 0 to 100. The videos tested include a mixture of resolutions — including Full HD (FHD) and 4K / Ultra HD (UHD) — and are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers.
Play and Plus jump on the winners’ podium for 5G Games Experience and share the award with the previous joint winners Orange and T-Mobile, with scores in the 78.5-80.1 points range. Our 5G users in Poland enjoy the Good (75-85) 5G Games Experience, regardless of the operator to which they are subscribed — a category higher than in the case of Games Experience. A Good rating for 5G Games Experience means most users deem the experience acceptable and do not experience a delay between their actions and the game.
5G Games Experience measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator's 5G network. It analyzes how our users’ multiplayer mobile gaming experience was affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter. 5G Games Experience for each operator is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100.
5G Games Experience 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. Calculating 5G Games Experience starts with measuring the end-to-end experience from users’ devices to internet end-points that host real games.
Orange and T-Mobile shared the top spot for 5G Voice App Experience in the previous report. This time, however, we see a four-way statistical tie between all analyzed Polish operators — and as a result, they all end as joint winners for 5G Voice App Experience. All operators place in a category higher than in Voice App Experience — Good (80-87). This means many users are satisfied but some experience minor quality impairments.
5G Voice App Experience quantifies the experience of Opensignal users when using over-the-top voice apps — such as WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger — on an operator’s 5G network. It uses a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 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. 5G Voice App Experience for each operator is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100.
Plus wins 5G Download Speed for the fourth consecutive time, with a score of 113.1Mbps — more than twice as fast as other Polish operators, which are all in a three-way statistical tie for second place. Plus remains the only winner of this award since Opensignal first introduced it in November 2021 — however, our users on this network observe 8.6Mbps slower speeds than in the previous report. T-Mobile’s average 5G download speeds seen by our users have improved by 5.9Mbps, while Orange and Play scores remain statistically unchanged.
5G Download Speed shows the average download speed experienced by Opensignal users across an operator’s 5G network. 5G Download Speed for each operator is calculated in Mbps (Megabits per second).
Play replaces T-Mobile as a joint winner for 5G Upload Speed, while Orange remains firmly on the winners’ podium, winning the award with Play with scores of 21.9-23.1Mbps. Play achieves this feat thanks to a burst in its average 5G speeds of 6.3Mbps (37.6%). T-Mobile takes third place with a score of 20.6Mbps, ahead of Plus, which brings up the rear with a score of 14.4Mbps.
5G Upload Speed measures the average upload speeds experienced by Opensignal users across an operator’s 5G network. 5G Upload Speed for each operator is calculated in Mbps (Megabits per second).
Orange and Play remain joint winners for Availability, with scores of 98.2-98.4% — which is the proportion of time users on these networks spend connected to either 3G, 4G or 5G services. Their scores remained statistically unchanged since the previous report. As Plus’s Availability score improved by 1.1 percentage score and T-Mobile dropped by 2.8 percentage points — Plus replaces T-Mobile in third place this time around, with a score of 95.7%.
Our availability metrics are not a measure of a network’s geographical extent. They won’t tell you whether you are likely to get a signal if you plan to visit a remote rural or nearly uninhabited region. Instead, they measure what proportion of time people have a network connection, in the places they most commonly frequent — something often missed by traditional coverage metrics. Looking at when users have a connection rather than where, provides us with a more precise reflection of the true user experience.
We also keep track of the instances that leave mobile users most frustrated: when there is no signal to connect to at all. The most common dead zones users struggle with occur indoors. As most of our availability data is collected indoors (as that’s where users spend most of their time), we’re particularly astute at detecting areas of zero signal.
Our availability metrics take a user-centric, time-based approach that complements the user-centric and geographical-based methodology used by our reach metrics.
Availability shows the proportion of time all Opensignal users on an operator’s network had either a 3G, 4G or 5G connection.
The coverage maps show the locations where we received measurements from users connecting with 3G or better mobile service. Each map provides an indication of the areas in which it is possible to obtain mobile service from that mobile operator.
Plus and T-Mobile were joint winners for 5G Availability in the previous report. This time, Plus is the sole winner with a score of 19.1%. This means our Plus 5G users with an active 5G subscription connect to 5G services for nearly 20% of their time. Plus’s 5G Availability score has risen by 5.1 percentage points, while T-Mobile’s has increased by 4.2 percentage points. Meanwhile, Orange and Play’s 5G Availability scores remain statistically unchanged, as both operators are in third place, with statistically tied scores of 11.4% and 10.9%, respectively.
Our availability metrics are not a measure of a network’s geographical extent. They won’t tell you whether you are likely to get a signal if you plan to visit a remote rural or nearly uninhabited region. Instead, they measure what proportion of time people have a network connection, in the places they most commonly frequent — something often missed by traditional coverage metrics. Looking at when users have a connection rather than where, provides us with a more precise reflection of the true user experience.
We also keep track of the instances that leave mobile users most frustrated: when there is no signal to connect to at all. The most common dead zones users struggle with occur indoors. As most of our availability data is collected indoors (as that’s where users spend most of their time), we’re particularly astute at detecting areas of zero signal.
Our availability metrics take a user-centric, time-based approach that complements the user-centric and geographical-based methodology used by our reach metrics.
5G Availability shows the proportion of time Opensignal users with a 5G device and a 5G subscription had an active 5G connection.
The coverage maps show the locations where we received measurements from users connecting with 3G or better mobile service. Each map provides an indication of the areas in which it is possible to obtain mobile service from that mobile operator.
T-Mobile takes home Excellent Consistent Quality (HD video, group video conference calls, and gaming) with a score of 81.6% — beating the previous joint winner Orange by one percentage point. Play comes third with a score of 79.3%, ahead of fourth-placed Plus which scores 76.6%.
Consistent Quality measures how often users’ experience on a network was sufficient to support common applications’ requirements. It measures download speed, upload speed, latency, jitter, packet loss, time to first byte and the percentage of tests attempted which did not succeed due to a connectivity issue on either the download or server response component.
Full details on how the Consistent Quality metrics — Excellent Consistent Quality and Core Consistent Quality — are calculated can be found here.
Excellent Consistent Quality is the percentage of users’ tests that met the minimum recommended performance thresholds to watch HD video, complete group video conference calls and play games.
After previously sharing Core Consistent Quality (lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls, and web browsing) with Orange, T-Mobile wins the award outright with a score of 92%. Orange takes the second spot, 0.8 percentage points behind the winner and 0.5 percentage points ahead of third-placed Play. Plus comes last with a score of 89.6% of users’ tests in which the operator met the minimum recommended performance thresholds.
Consistent Quality measures how often users’ experience on a network was sufficient to support common applications’ requirements. It measures download speed, upload speed, latency, jitter, packet loss, time to first byte and the percentage of tests attempted which did not succeed due to a connectivity issue on either the download or server response component.
Full details on how the Consistent Quality metrics — Excellent Consistent Quality and Core Consistent Quality — are calculated can be found here.
Core Consistent Quality is the percentage of users’ tests that met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls and web browsing.
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile and broadband user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
Opensignal is the leading global provider of independent insights into consumers' connectivity experiences and choice of carrier. Our proprietary insights into mobile and broadband networks give operators the solutions they need to profitably compete and win, from executive level scorecards and public validation to pin-point level engineering analytics and consumer decision dynamics.
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For every metric we calculate statistical confidence intervals indicated on our graphs. When confidence intervals overlap, our measured results are too close to declare a winner. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.
In our bar graphs we represent confidence intervals as boundaries on either sides of graph bars.
In our supporting-metric charts we show confidence intervals as +/- numerical values.
Why confidence intervals are vital in analyzing mobile network experience