November 3rd 2021
Movistar consistently offered the best mobile experience to its customers, according to Tutela’s new 2021 State of Mobile Experience for Spain. The report found that the operator offered its users the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in the country at 83.2%, and on 5G alone the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 91.5%.
Meanwhile, Orange was a strong contender to Movistar throughout all the metrics tested, with the operator placing second for Excellent and Core Consistent Quality, and was only 2.1% behind Movistar for 5G Excellent Consistent Quality. Yoigo also had the second greatest relative coverage in Portugal for both 4G/5G and total coverage.In order to benchmark mobile experience in Spain over the last six months, Tutela has evaluated over 27 million speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between April and September 2021.
Key findings from this report include:
Movistar has the best mobile experience and coverage in Spain, winning in all categories
- Movistar has the best mobile experience overall with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 83.2% and a Core Consistent Quality of 93.5%. For mobile experience on 5G alone, the operator had a clear win for Excellent Consistent Quality with a result of 91.5%, while it statistically tied for first place with Orange and Yoigo when it came to Core Consistent Quality. The operator also had the greatest relative coverage score for both 4G/5G combined and total coverage, and the greatest relative coverage while looking solely at 5G.
- In Tutela’s newest metric that measures subscriber’s video streaming experience, Movistar again performed best, with the highest video experience score of 3.87 thus topping the leaderboard in all the metrics tested for this report.
- Orange placed second for both overall Excellent and Core Consistent Quality as well as Excellent Consistent Quality on a 5G network while it placed first in a tie for 5G Core Consistent Quality. It also placed second for video experience with a score of 3.76 and a 5G coverage score of 35.
- Yoigo was a strong yet versatile competitor to second best Orange with its own strengths and weaknesses. It outperformed Orange for second place for relative area coverage for both 4G/5G combined as well as total coverage with scores of 488 and 553 respectively, likely as a result of the network sharing agreements that Yoigo has in place with both Movistar and Orange. Also, it placed first in a tie for Core Consistent Quality on 5G meaning subscribers on its 5G network would get a superior mobile experience for everyday use-cases such as web browsing.
- While the operator needs work to catch up in other metrics with its competitors in Spain, it did have a good performance when it comes to video streaming. It outperformed Yoigo with a video experience score of 3.72 narrowly missing second place.
Tom Luke, VP at Tutela, said: “Spain is a highly competitive market where expectations of great mobile performance are growing with the roll-out of 5G and the proliferation of video services and remote working. While all operators delivered strong experiences, Movistar stood out as a clear leader in both quality and coverage - delivering the best mobile experience in Spain in our testing, winning in all of our categories. We look forward to seeing how Vodafone, Orange and Yoigo respond with network investment to close the gap during the next year.”
The full report is available here.