Thanks to its Queldébit smartphone application and the data it collects, UFC-Que Choisir has a new tool to assess the quality of each mobile network (speeds, latency, web page display speed, quality of distribution of streaming videos, etc.). Here are the main lessons we can draw from the first round of results.
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| Mobile telephonyThe most efficient mobile networks |
Orange which confirms its position as “leader for the 11th consecutive year”, SFR and Bouygues Telecom which each claim the place of “2nd best mobile network in France”, Free Mobile which sees a “validation of its strategy”… The four major operators have, once again, interpreted the results of the annual survey to assess the quality of mobile services (web browsing, video playback, data transfer, SMS and voice calls) by the Regulatory Authority Electronic Communications, Posts and Press Distribution (Arcep), published on 19 November. For the 22nd edition of this study, the telecommunications policeman noted a general improvement in the quality of mobile networks, in particular speeds, in all areas (rural, intermediate and dense). At the same time, it highlighted quality differences. As for 5G, which was the subject of measurements for the first time, Arcep indicated that it brought better speeds, but not for all operators and not necessarily in the proportions promised by them. So who wins? Which operator really has the best network? Does the service provided by each of them live up to what subscribers expect?
To get its own idea, the UFC-Que Choisir launched, last June, its application called Queldébit. While Arcep, to establish its ranking, performs thousands of measurements in all corners of the country, our new tool has given us the possibility of collecting, in just a few months, valuable data on the mobile connections of French people. Speeds, latency, web page display speed, streaming video delivery quality… all this information, taken from thousands of speed tests, allows us to have a fairly precise idea of the performance of each operator. On the strength of these first results (and they are not the last!), we give you the two main lessons to remember.
REAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NETWORKS
The first observation is that the four mobile networks available in France do not really offer the same performance. Overall, that of Orange is well above average. The incumbent operator provides the best upload and download speeds (reception and transmission of data). Its subscribers, like those of Sosh, are therefore supposed to be able to retrieve their e-mails, download applications or even post photos on social networks via 4G faster than others. And that's not all. With Orange, videos play faster and web pages display more quickly. These good results did not really surprise us. It must be said that with its nearly 20 million mobile telephony customers, the operator has an unrivaled strike force. Thanks to this decisive advantage, it was able to deploy a large number of antennas throughout the territory and obtain the most efficient frequencies during the auctions organized by Arcep.
The competitors of this undisputed leader are competing for the other places on the podium, but depending on the criteria, the order varies. If we take into account the downstream speed, SFR climbs on the second step while Free is ahead of Bouygues Telecom by a hair. Regarding the loading time of web pages, this time it is Bouygues that distances SFR and Free. In short, if Orange firmly occupies the top of the ranking, its three challengers stand in a pocket handkerchief. However, these elements must be taken with some caution. On the one hand, these are national averages: depending on where you are, Orange may very well be overtaken by a competitor. On the other hand, the differences between the networks remain generally quite small. The real impact should ultimately remain relatively limited, even imperceptible.
THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IS WIDENING
The other big lesson from this first wave of results is that there is a gap between cities and the countryside when it comes to performance. While the average download speed enjoyed by Orange customers residing in urban areas is 79 Mb/s (megabits per second), it is only 41 Mb/s in rural areas. As for the upload speed, it goes from 16 to 9 Mb/s. The web pages also take longer to load in the campaigns. If, according to Arcep, the difference is not so great, it is because the regulatory authority measures the percentage of pages displayed in less than 10 seconds. According to our own results, at Orange, this is the case for 89% of web pages in rural areas and 96% in urban areas, a difference of 9 points. Except that 10 seconds for a web page to go up is a long time! We have therefore also recorded the pages appearing on the screen in less than 3 seconds, in order to better meet consumer expectations. With a result of 87% in urban areas and only 71% in rural areas, a difference of 16 points, the gap is widening. This trend is the same for almost all operators. Only Free offers similar or even better performance in rural areas. A phenomenon that is certainly due to a much more urban subscriber base than that of its competitors, hence the "traffic jams" in the cities.
This disparity between telephony in towns and telephony in the countryside is unfortunately not about to disappear, quite the contrary. Admittedly, as the telecoms authority asserts, average speeds are increasing everywhere in France. Nevertheless, it is clear that they tend to rise faster in urban regions than in rural areas, which further aggravates the digital divide between territories. In fact, despite the efforts made by operators to cover the whole of France with 3G or 4G, too many French people still live in white areas where they do not receive any signal.
And when an area is said to be "covered", this does not mean that the network is available everywhere, nor that the speed delivered is sufficient to take full advantage of your phone. It is still very common that residents do not have the possibility of bringing competition between operators, or even that they have no other choice but to go to the bottom of the garden to send an SMS or have a wire. As for surfing the Internet on their smartphone, as is naturally done in the city, many do not even think about it although their monthly plan costs them the same price as elsewhere. The problem is that operators may boast of deploying 4G in the countryside, but they continue to devote the vast majority of their investments to improving their service in dense regions. They do so in order to cope with population growth and the explosion of bandwidth-intensive uses, such as video or videoconferencing. If they even want to maintain their
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