Best mobile operators in Italy in speed and in coverage
WindTre loudly steps into the mobile experience award table
As the old saying goes, unity is strength: the newly merged WindTre won 2 awards and secured two additional draws out of a total of 7 national awards, while both of the former Wind and 3 Italia used to lag behind TIM and Vodafone in our previous reports. WindTre won in Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience and drew in Video Experience and 4G Coverage Experience.
Vodafone is now leading the table
Vodafone has consistently gained ground in our awards table in the last year, and went from winning one single award in May 2019, to winning one and drawing another two with TIM six months ago, to finally winning three awards and tying for a further one with WindTre in this report. Interestingly, Vodafone has held onto the 4G Availability award throughout the whole time, which was the only award we haven’t seen change hands since May last year.
TIM wins the most city awards
TIM won 16 awards and drew for an additional 80; WindTre won 8 awards and tied for another 73; Vodafone won 6 awards and was toe-to-toe in 77 additional categories. While we have seen Vodafone steadily gain ground and WindTre build momentum off its merger, TIM is still competing for our regional awards and secured the largest number of clear wins at the city level.
Vodafone wins our newly-launched Games Experience award
Vodafone won Italy’s first Games Experience award, scoring 75.5 points, and was the only operator landing in the Good category (75-85). TIM, WindTre and Iliad followed behind in the Fair category (65-75). Opensignal’s Games Experience metric uses measurements of 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.
Vodafone, TIM and WindTre pass the 90% mark in 4G Availability
Vodafone kept hold of our 4G Availability Award, scoring 92.2% but WindTre and TIM were close at 91.4% and 90.1%, respectively. Iliad is not far from the rest of the group and is also now in sight of the 90% mark having scored 88.7%.
Vodafone and TIM are not resting idly and have been given conditional approval by the European Commission to create Europe’s biggest mobile tower company as part of a strategy to speed up the rollout of 5G services.
Last but not least, the COVID-19 pandemic showed an impact on Italy’s mobile network experience similar to many other countries around the world. But the good news is that, regardless of the incremental challenges due to managing the increased load on the networks, our Italian smartphone users generally saw their mobile experience improve across all metrics except for Download Speed Experience compared to six months ago. In fact, our users on TIM and Vodafone’s networks saw their average download speeds decline. But this is not breaking news because six months ago we observed a similar decline, with both TIM and Vodafone seeing speeds fall compared to May 2019. Despite a few drops in download speeds, Italian operators have so far shown a resilient mobile experience in this unprecedented situation, improving most of their scores across OpenSignal metrics.
