Opensignal, which was purchased last week by Berkshire Partners’ company Comlinkdata, (see Inside Towers article) issued its 5G Global Mobile Network Experience Awards. The company is an independent analyzer of consumer mobile standards for wireless networks using open-source collecting of measurements from millions of devices worldwide. Opensignal then evaluates the data and issues their global rankings. The company cites the data coming from smartphone users is “measured indoors or out, any time of the day or night, bustling in a busy city or trekking in the countryside.”
The joint global winners for “5G Availability,” how frequently and reliably a company connects its users to 5G, are T-Mobile in the U.S. and STC in Kuwait. Users on both networks spent 35.7 percent and 33.6 percent of their time connected to 5G — about three times higher than the average 5G Availability of 11.3 percent measured across all 5G operators analyzed globally. Smaller geographies like Kuwait have an advantage over large markets like the U.S. in offering users high levels of 5G Availability. According to the report, “this makes the achievements of T-Mobile U.S. all the more impressive.”
T-Mobile’s President of Technology Neville Ray commented on the rankings by saying: “That’s what T-Mobile built 5G to do — we built 5G differently from the beginning, and this third-party report is the latest in a long list that shows how that’s paying off for customers.”
However, U.S. operators, as a rule, did not crack the Top Ten internationally in global speeds. The list of global leaders for 5G Availability is represented mainly by East Asian and Middle Eastern markets, with half of them from East Asia and one-third from the Middle East. These include all national operators in South Korea — SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ — and Hong Kong — 3, CMKH, csl and SmarTone, along with Taiwan’s FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile from East Asia. Meanwhile, 5G Global Leaders from the Middle East include Qatari operator Ooredoo, Kuwaiti operators Zain and Ooredoo, along with all three of Saudi Arabia’s national operators — Mobily, STC and Zain. Meanwhile, Netherlands’ T-Mobile was the only 5G Global Leader from Europe.
Among 5G Global Leaders from Europe, the report showed, TIM Italy’s users saw the fastest 5G Download Speed of 296.5 Mbps across the continent, while Swiss operator Sunrise was also a 5G Global Leader but is further down the table with a 5G Download Speed score of 217.4 Mbps.
The majority of the 5G Global Leaders for upload speed are from Europe, including Switzerland’s Sunrise and Swisscom, alongside Netherlands’ KPN and T-Mobile, on which T-Mobile says users enjoyed 5G upload speeds above 35 Mbps. The third Swiss operator, Salt, is also among the 5G Global Leaders, as are Saudi Arabia’s Zain and STC, TIM Italy and Deutsche Telekom. Users on all of these operators experienced speeds above the global average of 21.8 Mbps but below 30 Mbps.
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