Which telephone operator offers the best experience to its 5G subscribers? Unsurprisingly, Orange is well ahead of the latest biannual 5Gmark barometer, which measures the quality of service of the four national operators.
The historic operator totals 69,910 points in this benchmark produced by Qosi, a specialist in measuring the quality of service of telecom networks. It far exceeds SFR (47,807 points) and Bouygues Telecom (45,573). With 38,433 points, Free Mobile is not on the podium.
To achieve these results, Qosi carried out, during the second half of 2022, 235,668 test cycles on the cellular networks of the four operators. Consolidated data comes from two sources. First of all, there are the crowdsourced tests carried out by the community of users of 5Gmark, a mobile application under iOS and Android.
In addition, Qosi’s technical teams traveled across France to take measurements of the four networks at the same time, in the same place with reference terminals. These “drive testers” thus crisscrossed 57 departments during the second part of 2022.
The performance indicators to assess the customer experience in 5G are inspired by the data quality of service studies of Arcep, the French regulator of the telecoms sector. Four major test protocols have been selected: data transfer in downlink and uplink speed, web browsing and streaming video viewing.
Orange, number 1 in all categories
Throughput measurements are taken from file transfers (of about twenty different extensions) from and to servers based in France. The web browsing tests are based on the loading time of around thirty international and national pages, among the most popular on the net. Finally, streaming metrics focus on viewing YouTube videos at 720p resolution.
In this little game, Orange ranks first throughout 2022, without interruption. Behind, Bouygues Telecom, SFR and Free Mobile started almost on the same starting line in January 2022, to then see their lines cross several times. Depending on the month, Bouygues Telecom overtook SFR and vice versa.
Last but not least, Free Mobile, on the other hand, saw its quality of service deteriorate from the summer. We can thus see that the subscriber’s experience is decorrelated from the number of antennas and pylons. According to the latest count from the observatory of the National Frequency Agency (ANFR), the subsidiary of the Iliad group has, in fact, the largest number of mobile network sites in the territory.
Free Mobile is catching up in medium-sized towns and rural areas
Beyond this national ranking, 5Gmark measured the perception of the customer experience according to the location on the territory. Whether he lives in a large or medium-sized town or rural area, it differs very strongly. When 5G commercially opened up two years ago, operators began to cover the densest areas as a priority. Even today, 5G is slow to arrive in the countryside.
By taking this location criterion into account, the order in which the operators are ranked is affected. If Orange dominates the debates regardless of the level of population density considered, SFR and Bouygues Telecom hold it higher in large cities. In medium-sized towns (between 10,000 and 400,000 inhabitants) and in rural areas, Free Mobile is on a level playing field and is even ahead of its two competitors.
Finally, 5Gmark released its results region by region. If, once again, Orange systematically takes the lead, the order of its pursuers differs whether you are in Brittany or in the neighboring Pays de la Loire. In the first case, Bouygues Telecom is second. In the second, SFR took second place.