Italy

We've seen some big improvements in 4G Availability in Italy — but not from the country's leaders in 4G. Vodafone kept hold of our award, but its users saw no significant increase in their experience — and it was the same story for our users on TIM. The biggest increase in 4G Availability was seen by 3 Italia's users, who saw their score jump by over 10 percentage points, while Wind's score was up by over 9 points — allowing Wind to jump from joint-third place into the second spot and push TIM into third. Fourth-placed Iliad also managed an increase of 5 percentage points.

These increases in 4G Availability mean that the bottom three operators are closing the gap on the leaders, with less than 12 percentage points separating users’ experience on all five, down from a chasm of nearly 22 points in our last report. These increases also mean our users on all five of Italy's national operators now have 4G Availability scores over 75%, with four of them over the 80% mark. The gap in network experience between the operators is narrowing as competition in the Italian mobile market continues to be fierce.

TIM kept hold of our Video Experience award, pulling slightly ahead of the pack — but this was a result of a fall in second-placed Vodafone's score, rather than any increase from the winner. Indeed, both TIM and Vodafone's scores have fallen in the last six months: the former's by less than 1 point (out of 100), but the latter's by close to 3 points. Despite these drops, our users on both networks kept their Very Good Video Experience rating (65-75), meaning generally fast loading times and only occasional stalling on all but the highest resolutions.

The drops in TIM and Vodafone's Video Experience scores have allowed some of their rivals to close the gap on the leaders. Our users on both Iliad and Wind saw notable increases in their scores, of 4.6 and 3.7 points respectively. Our users on 3 Italia, Iliad and Wind's networks saw a Good Video Experience rating (55-65), meaning they have noticeably slower loading times compared to TIM and Vodafone, with stalling not being uncommon, especially at higher resolutions.

A couple of months ago, Opensignal launched our brand-new Voice App Experience metric, which measures the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger on mobile networks. In a similar way to Video Experience, our metric ranks operators on a scale of 0-100 using a mean opinion score (MOS) model derived from an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality, taking into account a number of factors including latency and packet-loss.

In this report, our users on TIM and Vodafone saw the best Voice App Experience, drawing for our award with scores close to 79 (out of 100). However, Italy's other operators weren't far behind the leaders, with all five operators' scores falling within just 4 points of each other. All of our Italian users saw scores in the Acceptable rating (74-80) for Voice App Experience, meaning most users are generally able to comprehend without repetition, but there can be perceptible call quality impairments, such as brief periods of clicking sounds or distortion, or insufficiently loud volume. Looking at our 4G-only Voice App Experience scores, our users on TIM, Vodafone and Wind's 4G networks rated Good (80-87), meaning very occasional clicking sounds, volume drops and distortion, but mostly a clear and satisfactory experience.

We've seen some key improvements from Italy's smaller three operators in this report — but nowhere was this more evident than in our Download Speed Experience measurements. Our users on 3 Italia, Iliad and Wind all saw notable increases in their speeds, while TIM and Vodafone's scores have actually dropped since our last report. In fact, TIM's drop of 1.5 Mbps allowed Vodafone to catch up, and the two operators have now drawn for our Download Speed Experience award.

Our Wind users saw the greatest increase of over 6 Mbps (close to 40%) in their Download Speed Experience scores — but both 3 Italia and Iliad also saw their scores improve by over 3 Mbps. These increases, along with the drops in TIM and Vodafone's scores, have meant that the gap between the fastest and slowest operator in Italy has almost halved in six months — from over 10 Mbps in our last report to just 5.6 Mbps in our latest data.

Our analysis shows that growth in Download Speed Experience for our users on TIM and Vodafone has plateaued. This is something of a concern, as they appear to have both peaked at around the 25 Mbps mark — well below the scores of 30 Mbps and above that we are now regularly seeing in other European markets. Italy ranked as one of the slowest countries in the continent in our recent global State of Mobile Network Experience report — behind many arguably less developed markets including Serbia and Albania. However, our users on 3 Italia, Iliad and Wind's networks continue to see impressive growth in their scores, meaning the Download Speed Experience across Italy's operators is levelling out.

We've seen a mirror of the trend in Download Speed Experience in our upload measurements. TIM's Upload Speed Experience score has dropped by over 1 Mbps in the past six months, while Wind's has increased — forcing a draw between the two for our award (which was won outright by TIM in our last report). Our Vodafone users also saw their Upload Speed Experience fall by over 1 Mbps, while Iliad's increased and 3 Italia's stayed practically the same.

TIM held onto our Latency Experience award, as our TIM users saw an improvement of some 1.6 milliseconds on their network response time. But our Vodafone users saw an improvement of close to 4ms in their Latency Experience — and there is now less than a millisecond between the two operators' scores.

Latency is the one metric where we are still seeing strong evidence of two tiers of mobile network experience in Italy. TIM and Vodafone's Latency Experience scores remain over 15ms faster than any of their rivals’, as our 3 Italia users saw their score worsen by over 5ms, while Iliad's score was stagnant and remains nearly twice that of the leaders. However, Wind should be applauded for improving users’ experience by close to 3ms.