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Telekom scores a 4G clean sweep of Germany's regions

In our most recent State of Mobile Networks: Germany report, we found Telekom was head and shoulders above its rivals in our metrics. The operator won five out of seven of OpenSignal's awards including the highly-prized 4G download speed and 4G availability categories. Meanwhile, our chart showing our 4G metrics winners in 10 of Germany's biggest cities was largely painted with Deutsche Telekom's signature shade of magenta.

We've seen this pattern replicated in Germany's five regions, where our metrics show Telekom won both our 4G download speed and 4G availability categories across the board – and generally by pretty large margins. So how did the country's other two national operators, Telefónica's O2 and Vodafone, measure up to the undisputed leader in our 4G measurements?

Germany regions

In our 4G availability metric, Telekom remarkably beat its closest rival Vodafone by a clear 10 percentage points in every region. Telekom also showed impressive consistency in our 4G availability category, achieving scores of over 80% in every region, with its peak being 83.5% in the Northeast. Our users on Vodafone's LTE network were able to achieve 4G availability scores of over 70% in only two regions, the North and Northeast, while O2 trailed even further behind, scoring over 60% in two regions, the Northeast and the West.

Telekom's dominance continued over into our 4G download speed metric, where the operator smashed its rivals by well over 10 Mbps in four out of five regions — and was over 9 Mbps ahead in the fifth, the Southwest. We measured average 4G speeds greater than 30 Mbps for Telekom in the Northeast, South and West. In the West, Telekom's 4G download score was a particularly impressive rate of 39.1 Mbps. Once again, the followers were some way behind, with Vodafone managing to break the 20 Mbps mark in three of the five regions, while O2 's scores were the wrong side of 20 Mbps in all five of them.

We've found that 4G availability scores of over 80% are becoming increasingly common among world telecoms operators. Our latest The State of LTE report found mobile users in 30 out of the 88 countries we examined could connect to LTE networks in 4 out of 5 attempts. But yet, Germany was not one of these countries, appearing in the lower half of our table with an average 4G availability score of 65.7%. This trend was repeated in our 4G speed analysis, which found Germany in mid-table with average download speeds of 22.7 Mbps.

The stark disparity between Telekom's scores and its rivals means that some of the country's operators have some pretty serious catching-up to do. But we are seeing improvements across most of our metrics for all three of Germany's players, and competition is increasing, meaning we expect to see this market mature pretty quickly over the course of our next few reports.

What’s your experience of the 4G customer experience in Germany? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.