Someone finally did a thorough research of how 5G is currently being used in Poland. Tragedy

I hope that on the eve of the auction of the appropriate 5G frequencies in Poland, Opensignal made available to us the results of its report on the quality of Polish mobile networks. It differs significantly from the reports we’ve already seen before.

At the outset, I will immediately explain that this is the first report that shows the real experience of users using mobile networks in Poland. Especially in the case of testing the availability of 5G coverage, where the speeds we can achieve in a particular place do not appear often within the ideal range, but for how long we can use this coverage in places where we often stay or move .

We will return to this in the section devoted to 5G availability in Poland. According to the overall results of the survey, operators somehow shared their victories in individual categories, with the exception of Play, which won only against other operators in five categories.

Watch video online via mobile in Poland

Going to the details, the best experience while watching a video using mobile Internet access was enjoyed by users of the T-Mobile network, which scored 57.1 points out of a possible 100, while Orange scored a slightly lower score – 55.9.

The same ranking was in the case of the general experience of users who also used 5G coverage in their research, except that Orange was slightly better here – 64.3 points, T-Mobile – 63.

Play online via mobile in Poland

Of course, these are mobile games that we play on our smartphones, and interestingly enough, experiences in this category are similar for each operator, regardless of whether the overall results are or were made among users who also use 5G coverage.

Voice calls via mobile applications in Poland

Voice calls have been tested in apps like WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook Messenger. Here, too, we cannot talk about any significant differences between all operators, and the results for all users are the same.

Download data online via mobile in Poland

Only when examining the speed of data downloaded by mobile networks can we see a difference in the overall results and the results of users who also used 5G coverage.

The average speed of the data downloaded was higher in the latter, around 10-20MB/s. The greatest improvement, taking into account measurements in 5G, was achieved by Plus – from 23.3 Mb / s to 44 Mb / s.

Send data via mobile Internet in Poland

The same is the case with average data transmission speeds.

Scope of mobile networks in Poland

Another category in the study was the experience of using 5G network coverage only by individual operators, but we will first turn to the coverage part, because in this study this category finally shows the actual state of 5G implementation in Poland.

With the aggregate results, we have data provided by all operators, so the availability of mobile networks, regardless of technology, covers almost 100% of the country.

However, the availability of 5G during measurements in places where users often stay, ie at home, at work, on the way to / from, amounted to only about 10%-14% of the time.

As a result, 5G coverage is rated very low by individual operator users on a scale of 1 to 10.

Experience in using 5G in mobile networks in Poland

Now we can return to the lost experiences of using 5G in Poland. The results are much better than the web experience, regardless of the technology available.

Here, in particular, the huge advantage of Plus with average data download speed can be noted – so the results of research conducted by Rfbenchmark, which conducted 5G tests in the largest cities of Poland this and last year, were confirmed. This is, of course, due to the technology used in 5G by this operator, which has assigned a separate band to users who use it. With other operators, 4G and 5G users share network access.

Final assessment of the quality of mobile networks in Poland

In the main category in which network quality was evaluated based on the percentage of tests that meet the minimum recommended performance thresholds: in HD video playback, group conferencing and gaming – T-Mobile won 82.6% of the tests.

Orange, in turn, won the number of tests in the lowest category, that is, within the recommended performance limits: when playing SD quality video, voice calls and browsing websites – with a score of 91.5% of the tests.

The tests were conducted over a period of 90 days – from February 1, 2022 to May 1, 2022.

Source: Opensignal.