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Mobile Networks Update: Brazil (June 2018)
It's been six months since our last in-depth analysis of Brazil, so it's time for Opensignal's semi-annual revisitation of our metrics. In our second Mobile Networks Update for Brazil, we examined more than 6.4 billion measurements to see how Brazil's five nationwide mobile providers stacked up in our 3G and 4G metrics.
- We tracked notable increases in 4G availability on three of Brazil's four national LTE providers since our last report. The biggest gains were in Claro's and TIM's measurements, as their 4G availability scores both climbed 4 percentage points. TIM's increased LTE reach only reinforced its big lead in our 4G availability metric. Our users were able to tap into a TIM LTE signal 75.9% of the time.
- While 4G availability was on the rise, our measurements show 4G download speed in Brazil hit a period of stagnation over the last six months. No operator registered an increase in 4G speed, and in several cases we recorded slight dips in average 4G download speeds since our last report. Even though Claro held steady in 4G download speed at 28 Mbps, it remained the unquestioned leader in this metric, nearly 8 Mbps ahead of its nearest rival Vivo. Claro topped off its 4G download award with wins in our 3G download speed, 4G upload speed and overall download speed categories.
- In our January analysis of Brazil's three largest metro areas, we saw our 4G download speed and availability awards spread among a wide array of operators. But in this most recent test period, it looks like our national winners are cementing their leads in Brazil's big urban areas. Claro won our 4G download speed award in Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, while TIM solidified its 4G availability position, sharing the award only with Claro in Belo Horizonte. However, we see a lot of competition between the 4G operators for our LTE upload and latency metrics in the three cities we examined.
Opensignal Awards Table
 | Download Speed: 4G | Download Speed: 3G | Download Speed: Overall | Upload Speed: 4G | Latency: 4G | Latency: 3G | Availability: 4G |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Claro |
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Nextel |
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Oi | |||||||
TIM |
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Vivo |
Performance by Metric
Download Speed: 4G
Download Speed: 3G
Download Speed: Overall
Upload Speed: 4G
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.
Upload Speed: 4G
This metric shows the average upload speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.
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.
Regional Performance
This chart shows the regional winners in each category Opensignal measures. Click on the icons to see a more detailed graph showing each operator’s metrics in a particular region.
Legend:
T
TIM
C
Claro
V
Vivo
O
Oi
N
Nextel | Region | Download Speed: 4G | Upload Speed: 4G | Latency: 4G | Availability: 4G |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belo Horizonte | ||||
| Rio de Janeiro | ||||
| São Paulo |
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, 6,460,804,954 datapoints were collected from 372,841 users during the period: 2018-03-01 - 2018-05-29.
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.
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