The consumer association deplores the excessive gap in mobile speeds between rural areas and denser areas, in a new study published on Thursday.
Last year, UFC-Que Choisir launched its free collaborative application, QuelDébit, available on Android and iOS, to allow French people to measure the quality of their internet connection, in order to build a barometer of mobile speeds in rural, intermediate and dense areas. While it has nearly 50,000 users for its tool, the consumer association has delivered its verdict. She denounces a unacceptable digital divide “, materialized by rural areas that have difficulty in accessing a “ good broadband “, whether in 4G or 5G.
Orange, better speeds in 4G; Free Mobile, priority for rural areas
UFC-Que Choisir published its indicators on Thursday on the basis of 520,000 tests carried out until November 30, 2021, which have the advantage of placing the various operators on an equal footing: 27% of the tests have been carried out under Orange, 24.7% under SFR, 24.5% under Bouygues Telecom, and 23.9% under Free Mobile. Remember that an urban (or dense) area is considered to be any agglomeration of more than 400,000 inhabitants. The intermediate zones are between 10,000 and 400,000 inhabitants, and the rural zones bring together the agglomerations of less than 10,000 inhabitants, as well as the smallest municipalities located outside the agglomerations.
The consumer association makes a clear statement. Regarding 4G, which accounts for 95% of the data collected by the QuelDébit app, there is no real surprise: the disparities between areas are real, and this, among all operators, even if Orange offers, for example, better download speeds (download), with an average of 61.5 Mbit/s (compared to 40.7 Mbit/s for SFR, 37.5 Mbit/s for Free and 36.6 Mbit/s for Bouygues).
In urban areas, the association’s application brings up average download speeds of 55.3 Mbit/s. In intermediate areas, it drops to 42.3 Mbit/s, while in rural areas, this average is the lowest: 33.3 Mbit/s. We note all the same that Free Mobile is an exception, being the only operator to present better speeds in rural areas (40.6 Mbit/s) than in intermediate (37.3 Mbit/s) and urban areas (31.8 Mbps).
The finding is broadly the same with regard to uplink speeds (data transmission). Orange has the best average (12.8 Mbit/s, ahead of Bouygues, SFR and Free), while urban areas are once again the most advantaged, with average speeds of 13.6 Mbit/s, against 10.7 Mbit/s in intermediate areas and 8.5 Mbit/s in rural areas.
Weak 5G in rural areas and wired speeds far from expectations
In urban areas, therefore, average speeds are 66% higher than in rural areas (55.3 against 33.3 Mbit/s). Regarding latency, ie the speed of data transmission, urban areas also show better results (67 ms) compared to intermediate (77 ms) and rural areas (87 ms).
5G, for its part, allows at this stage a simply considerable speed gain in urban areas and intermediate areas, with speeds four to five times higher when switching from 4G to 5G (which exceeds 200 Mbit/s on average in download). On the other hand, it is much less obvious in rural areas, where the average speed in 5G (48.9 Mbit/s) can even be lower than the 4G of the largest cities and intermediate zones.
To accentuate everything, the UFC-Que Choisir devoted a section of its study to wired speeds, and this raises a critical point. While the minimum quality mentioned should be 3 Mbit/s (which remains particularly low), 14.3% of the speeds recorded are below this threshold. In rural areas, this is the case in almost 20% of cases, today a wired connection greater than 8 Mbit/s is considered to be “good broadband”. In this case, today, this speed is not reached in 25% of cases at the national level, and for 32% of consumers located in rural areas. UFC-Que Choisir evokes here a digital divide, which it judges ” inadmissible “. Remember that by the end of 2022, all French people will be supposed to benefit from a very high speed wired connection of at least 30 Mbit/s. Suffice to say that it is not won.
Source: UFC-What to choose
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