Mobile Networks Update: Brazil (June 2017)

Six months have passed since Opensignal published its last State of Mobile Networks: Brazil report, so it's time for our semi-annual update on 3G and 4G performance in the region. For our Mobile Networks Update we've taken a snapshot of the mobile market in Brazil, tracking changes in any of our key metrics.

  • 4G availability in Brazil is improving. In our last Brazil report no operator was able to deliver a 4G connection to our users more than 60% of the time. But in our most recent tests two operators, TIM and Vivo, had 4G availability scores greater than 62%.

  • Claro was still the leader in 4G speed in our March-to-May test period, averaging download speeds of 29.2 Mbps, an improvement of nearly 2 Mbps since our last report. Vivo finished second in our 4G speed rankings with an average download of 20.6 Mbps, but both Oi and TIM scored below the global 4G speed average of 16.2 Mbps, as measured in our State of LTE report.

  • Nextel didn’t factor into our LTE metrics as it only offers 4G service in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, but it rated highly in 3G speed, drawing with Claro for first place in our 3G download measurements.

Opensignal Awards Table

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Download Speed: Overall Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

Claro

 medal medal medal medal

Nextel

 medal medal

Oi

TIM

 medal medal

Vivo

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Performance by Metric

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Download Speed: Overall Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

Download Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: 3G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: Overall

This metric shows the average download speed experienced by Opensignal users across all of an operator's 3G and 4G networks. Overall speed doesn't just factor in 3G and LTE speeds, but also the availability of each network technology. Operators with lower LTE availability tend to have lower overall speeds because their customers spend more time connected to slower 3G networks.

Latency: 4G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Latency: 3G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Availability: 4G

This metric shows the proportion of time Opensignal users have an LTE connection available to them on each operator’s network. It's a measure of how often users can access a 4G network rather than a measure of geographic or population coverage.

Our Methodology

Opensignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 3 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide.

Our measurements are collected at all hours of the day, every day of the year, under conditions of normal usage, including inside buildings and outdoors, in cities and the countryside, and everywhere in between. By analyzing on-device measurements recorded in the places where subscribers actually live, work and travel, we report on mobile network service the way users truly experience it.

For this particular report, 939,450,901 datapoints were collected from 40,717 users during the period: 2017-03-01 - 2017-05-31.

We continually adapt our methodology to best represent the changing experience of consumers on mobile networks and, therefore, comparisons of the results to past reports should be considered indicative only. For more information on how we collect and analyze our data, see our methodology page.

For every metric we've calculated statistical confidence intervals and plotted them on all of the graphs. When confidence intervals overlap for a certain metric, our measured results are too close to declare a winner in a particular category. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.

Opensignal Limited retains ownership of this report including all intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis. Reports produced by Opensignal Limited may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed, published for any commercial purpose (including use in advertisements or other promotional content) without prior written consent.