State of Mobile Networks: Peru (August 2017)

In our second report on Peru, OpenSignal looked at the four main operators offering 3G and 4G services in the country: Movistar, Claro, Entel and Bitel. From 9,237 user smartphones equipped with our app, we’ve captured 173,980,239 measurements during our sample period between April and June of this year.

Highlights

Entel: A leader in every category

Out of the six categories we measure, Entel won three of them outright -- 4G availability, 3G download speed and 4G latency -- and was tied for first in the remaining three: 4G download speed, overall speed and 3G latency.

Good 4G availability from all operators

Entel was the clear winner in our 4G availability metric, as its users were able to access LTE services almost 80% of the time. But we found the level of LTE service availability from all four operators to be excellent. Bitel is worthy of particular mention considering it only launched LTE last December. Our Bitel testers were able to latch onto an LTE signal in 3 out of every 4 attempts.

Entel and Movistar in 4G-speed tie

Two operators, Entel and Movistar, were neck and neck in our 4G speed measurements with users experiencing between 21 Mbps and 22 Mbps downloads. Those speeds are well above the global LTE average of 16.2 Mbps.

Peru is regionally strong in LTE

Peru as a whole stacks up well against its Latin American neighbors. In our latest State of LTE report, Peru scored 67% in 4G availability and averaged 4G speeds of 21 Mbps, putting it ahead of countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia in both categories.

Opensignal Awards Table

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

Bitel

medal

Claro

Entel

medal medal medal medal medal medal

Movistar

medal medal

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Performance by Metric

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.

Analysis

LTE is ramping up in Peru in a big way. Since our last Peru report came out in 2016, a new 4G operator, Bitel, has entered the scene, bringing the number of nationwide LTE providers to four. In addition, Peru has become a regional standout ranking highly in Latin America in both 4G speeds and availability. In our State of Mobile Networks: Peru report, we’ve looked at the four main operators: Telefónica’s Movistar, América Móvil’s Claro, Entel and Viettel Telecom’s Bitel. Having only launched LTE in December 2016, Bitel has already emerged as a competitive 4G force, but Entel was the stand out operator in our results. It won or shared first place awards in all six metrics covered in this report.

This latest OpenSignal report on Peru is based on 173,980,239 measurements taken during the 2nd quarter of this year from 9,237 smartphones equipped with our app. We should point out that since we published our last Peru report, we’ve made some adjustments to both the way we collect data from our smartphone apps and the methodology we use to parse that data. The update allows us to make more measurements, examine new types of network metrics and hone the precision of the measurements we've always collected, helping us isolate the typical consumer mobile experience more effectively (for more details, see our blog post). The changes haven't affected our overall rankings of networks in Peru, or around the world, but for the sake of analytical rigor we aren't making any direct comparisons between results collected from the two different methodologies.

Plenty of LTE signals

LTE service availability in Peru is excellent. Entel was the clear winner in this category, with its users able to access LTE services almost 79.8% of the time. In the seven months since Bitel launched its LTE service, it’s already managed to achieve 74.5% 4G availability, beating out mobile market leader Movistar, which scored 71% in our availability tests. Claro may have had the lowest score in the category at 67.4%, but that’s still a respectable availability result, particularly when compared with other markets in Latin America.

In our 4G-speed category, it was statistically too close to separate Entel and Movistar, who tied for first place. Our users on both operators’ networks experienced very healthy speeds above 21 Mbps. After Entel and Movistar, speeds dropped off considerably for our remaining operators. Claro averaged 4G download speeds of 16.8 Mbps in our tests, coming in just ahead of the global LTE average of 16.2 Mbps, as measured in our recent State of LTE report. Bitel’s new 4G service may be highly accessible but the operator still has some work to do when it comes to providing fast connection speeds. We measured average LTE speeds of 11.8 Mbps on its network. In the 3G download category, Entel once again came in first, delivering average speeds of 4.7 Mbps in our tests. It was the only operator that provided 3G connections faster than 4 Mbps in this reporting period.

The next metric, overall speed, takes into account not only an operator’s 3G and LTE download speeds, but also the availability of each service. Here Entel and Movistar tied for first-place in our results, the winners delivering average speeds to users of 14.7 Mbps and 13.5 Mbps, respectively. The slower 4G speeds we recorded on Bitel really hurt the operator in overall speed. Bitel came in last place in our overall speed metric with an average download of 6.3 Mbps.

Our final two metrics, 3G and 4G latency, measure the delay in milliseconds experienced by data travelling round-trip through the network -- the shorter the delay the better the result. In our 4G latency category, Entel was the clear winner with its LTE users experiencing only a 37ms delay, indicating a very responsive network. In the 3G latency stakes it was a tie for first place between Entel and Bitel.

Overall Peru compared favorably to other countries in Latin America in both 4G speed and availability. In our State of LTE report, Peru had a national 4G availability of 67.4% putting it ahead of such regional powers as Argentina (62.2%), Colombia (59.5%) and Brazil (55.3%). Though Peru did fall short of matching Mexico’s score of 69%, there’s been a lot of improvement in Peru’s LTE availability since the January-March time period covered in the LTE report. As all four of Peru’s major operators were able to provide an LTE signals more than 67% in our most recent tests, we expect Peru to rank even higher in 4G availability in our next State of LTE report.

In 4G speeds, Ecuador and Mexico beat out Peru in our LTE report, but Peru’s average LTE download of 21 Mbps put it ahead of Brazil, Colombia and Chile, which each had average 4G speeds around 19 Mbps, as well as Argentina, which averaged 4G speeds of 11.5 Mbps.

Exciting 4G times in Peru

A factor that could provide a boost to Peru’s mobile fortunes is the availability of bandwidth previously reserved for broadcast TV in the 700 MHz band and now destined for mobile broadband services. Claro won the major block of this spectrum in May when it was auctioned, having bid US$306 million for the privilege. Claro is allocating a further US$1 billion to extend its network infrastructure in 2018. Entel is also allocating US$1.1 billion during the three-year period to mid-2019 to improve 4G services, having spent US$300 billion on its share of the 700-MHz band allocation.

And while Bitel failed to win any 700-MHz spectrum last year, the operator is deploying 1,000 new antennas for its 4G network, as well as considerable fibre-optic and backbone infrastructure, with focus on reaching users in remote and provincial regions. Based on our data Peru is already made good progress in LTE. With new spectrum and operator investment, that progress should only continue.

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.

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 this particular report, 173,980,239 datapoints were collected from 9,237 users during the period: 2017-04-01 - 2017-06-30.

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.