We often are surprised at the resilience of legacy services. That appears to be the case for German mobile users and 3G. According to a recent study by Opensignal, as many as half of German subscriber identity modules (mobile accounts) are not enabled for 4G service.
According to Opensignal, perhaps 81 percent of those non-users have for some reason elected not to buy 4G service. Some might suggest the “poor” state of German 4G networks explains why people do not buy. That seems unlikely.
In a July 2019 study by Tutela, 4G downstream speeds averaged 23.5 Mbps on Telekom’s network, 21 Mbps on Vodafone and 18 Mbps on O2 networks.
To be sure, German downstream speeds tend to be slower than in Switzerland or Austria, as measured by Tutela, but average downstream speeds--based on both 3G and 4G activity--of about 14 Mbps do not seem out of line on a global basis.
Also, recent tests show typical 4G speeds in German cities ranging from about 25 Mbps to 35 Mbps, which does not seem slow, as far as 4G goes.
Nor do German 4G speeds seem to have lagged, by about 2017, in comparison to other developed nations.
The point is that it is not self evident that poor 4G experience explains the lag in uptake. But some might point to coverage, rather than speed, as an explanation.
“Whereas network providers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland can almost all offer LTE (4G) connections nearly 90 percent of the time, German communications giant Deutsche Telekom in Germany achieves only a 75 percent rate,” a study by consulting firm P3 says. Vodafone in Germany has 57 percent LTE coverage, P3 says.
By some estimates, 4G coverage in Germany does not seem underdeveloped, though, and less coverage in eastern regions might be explained by greater rural character in the east.
According to Germany’s Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), at the end of 2018, there were 107.5m active SIM cards in Germany (excluding M2M and IoT cards), but only 50.5m 4G/LTE SIM cards in active use. This would indicate that roughly half of the active SIM cards were not LTE-enabled
According to Opensignal, 81.4 percent of users that have never connected to 4G had a 4G-capable phone and spent time in 4G-covered areas. “These users likely did not upgrade to a 4G subscription or have disabled 4G connections on their phones,” says Opensignal.
Perhaps 15.6 percent of users who did not connect to 4G networks spent time in 4G-covered areas but did not have a 4G-capable device.
A small percentage of non-4G users (perhaps three percent) appear not to live in rural areas where 4G is available.
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