Spirent Communications studied more than 47,000 calls and 170,000 data tests on iPhone 5C devices across wireless operators in the United Kingdom and found that the main differences among operators came down to data speeds, while all operators performed well in call and file upload/download completions.
The study was commissioned by Telefonica O2 and conducted from May to July of this year in 20 major cities in England, Scotland and Wales. It examined call completion rates, data session completion, speeds for web browsing and file upload and download. Measurements were performed using iPhone 5c handsets that Spirent purchased at retail stores, plus Spirent’s systems for user experience analytics that include its Nomad solution for assessing voice services, Datum for data services, Chromatic for video calling and Quantum for battery life.
“Our goal is to provide the industry with an independent and accurate view of the user experience,” said Des Owens, who is general manager for service experience at Spirent, in a statement. “To ensure accuracy, we only use real, unmodified devices for our user experience measurements — the same devices consumers purchase in retail stores. We measure the key factors that matter to users like the ability to make calls and browse to web sites and we do it all with a statistically rigorous sampling methodology. Our customers appreciate that we don’t just provide independent measurement services — we also give them the ability to perform their own measurements and analysis with our suite of user experience analytics systems.”
Call completion rates were comparable across all operators and were excellent overall, at 98.8% to 99.0% with “no operator exhibiting a statistically relevant difference relative to other operators,” according to Spirent.
Four operator networks were measured, but only Telefonica O2 was identified in the results. Those test results included:
- Web browsing: Telefonica O2 ranked first in speed with an average load time of 2.7 seconds on five tested web sites. The lowest-ranked network took 3.4 seconds for web browsing. However, all the operators were very similar in terms of their web browsing success rate, with all of them reaching more than 96%. Telefonica O2 ranked second out of four at 97.9%, with the top network showing a 98.6% success rate and the lowest-ranked network at 96.4%.
- File download: Telefonica O2 shared the first-place ranking for speed with another network, where both had speeds above 11 Mbps. Although the unnamed competitor slightly edged Telefonica O2 in terms of overall speeds (11.6 Mbps, vs. Telefonica O2’s 11.3 Mbps), Spirent noted that they shared top ranking because the difference was not considered statistically significant compared to the overall differences among operators. The lowest-ranked network registered speeds of 6.4 Mbps. In terms of file download success rates, the highest network had a 99.5% success rate and the lowest-ranked network still came in at 97.4%. Telefonica O2 was ranked second with 98.6% success in file downloads.
- File upload: Telefonica O2 ranked first again in speed, with an average upload speed of 5.5 Mbps and also managed to come in first with file upload success 99.2% of the time. The slowest network had average upload speed of 3.0 Mbps, and the lowest-ranked for file upload success was 97.6%.
