Switzerland shines in mobile network experience among DACH countries

In our recent analyses of global mobile networks, we've seen a pretty wide range of user experiences across Europe. This is to be expected, since the continent is home to some of the most advanced mobile markets in the world, as well as some nations that are still moving towards mobile maturity. How do the mature markets of Central Europe's Germanic heartland — the DACH states — compare?

Much like our analysis of the rest of the continent, we saw a wide range of user experiences across Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Our Swiss users enjoy the best speeds and 4G Availability, while it is the Austrians who have the highest-quality mobile Video Experience. And it's notable that our German users are pretty far behind their two DACH neighbors in the majority of our core metrics. 

Looking at our speed metrics, it's clear that Switzerland is head and shoulders above its Germanic neighbors. In Download Speed Experience, Swiss users experienced speeds over 46% faster than Austria and a massive 68% ahead of Germany. Switzerland also surpassed those countries in Upload Speed Experience, scoring 67% quicker than Austria and nearly 79% ahead of our users in Germany.

We saw some major improvements in our speed metrics in Switzerland in our most recent report — particularly from Swisscom, which has benefited from its use of higher band spectrum in urban areas. By comparison, in Germany, Telekom kept hold of both our speed awards in our last report — but the market leader saw no statistical growth in either Download or Upload Speed Experience in the prior six months. This stagnation could see Germany fall further behind its DACH neighbors in the coming year. 

Germany also lagged behind its closest neighbors in 4G Availability, coming in over 10 percentage points behind Switzerland and nearly 6 points shy of Austria. This was once again reflected by Telekom's performance in our last Germany report, where the operator's 4G Availability score stagnated. And our German users saw latencies close to 10 milliseconds slower than Swiss users in our average Latency Experience measurements.

Switzerland wasn't able to claim the DACH crown in all our core metrics though. In both Video and Voice App Experience, it was our users in Austria who enjoyed a better experience — although Switzerland was very close behind the leader in both these metrics. While our scores in both these categories were much closer than in our other four core metrics, Germany was still notably behind its two neighbors — although we are at least seeing some improvement in Video Experience in the country.

Although Germany is a considerably larger state than the other DACH countries, the three have a lot in common economically and geopolitically, and their mobile markets have developed largely in parallel. All three markets have a dominant former incumbent, and have experienced shifts in competition due to M&A or the exit of a major European player. 

In some markets the differences between the operators are large. But despite this, looking at our recent Germany report, the market leader is still behind both Austria and Switzerland's national averages across the majority of our metrics. Only in our speed metrics was Telekom able to beat the Austrian national average.

Opensignal's analytics focus on real-world user-centric measures. We measure the experience everyday users receive on their wireless networks. We strongly believe that the user experience must be central to any mobile offering — and our comparison of the DACH countries shows that there's still a fairly stark difference in the mobile network experience across these similar European markets.