Optus holds on to the number one spot for best 5G download speeds

In its final report for 2023, Opensignal has crowned Optus the winner in no less than nine categories (although two are tied wins).

Opensignal’s Mobile Network Experience report tracks the performance of the Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone networks across four categories: Overall Experience, 5G Experience, Coverage and Consistency.

When it came to 5G, Optus was the clear standout. Optus swept up the 5G Download Speed award for the fifth time in a row, owing to it having the fastest average 5G download speeds in Australia.

Its 5G download speed measured in at 226.5Mbps which is around 12% faster than Opensignal's Telstra users and over twice as fast as Opensignal's Vodafone users (which had average download speeds of 102.5Mbps).

Optus also won the awards for Overall Video Experience, Overall Live Video Experience and Overall Games Experience. It also won those awards in the 5G category tying with Vodafone for 5G Games Experience.

These categories are scored out of 100 points based on criteria such as satisfactory load times with little stalling, video quality, and latency (how long it takes data to travel to and from the server). 

You can see which networks won across each category in this graphic.

What about network coverage?

When it comes to coverage it was a different story altogether. This time around Opensignal introduced two new awards one for Coverage Experience and the other for 5G Coverage Experience. 

Traditionally, coverage is measured either as a percentage of land or population covered but this can be inaccurate. Both the overall and 5G Coverage Experience awards measure geographic coverage of populated areas to capture the experience of typical network users.

Telstra took both awards home with a score of 9.4 out of 10 for Coverage Experience and 5.5 out of 6 for 5G Coverage Experience. Optus came second with scores of 8.2 and 3.2 respectively while Vodafone came last in both categories.

While Optus’ 5G Experience scores are impressive at the end of the day it won’t really matter how fast its speeds are if you can’t get connected.

The data for this report was collected between July 1 and September 28, 2023.

You can read the full Opensignal Mobile Network Experience report for more information. 

Dylan Crismale

Digital Content Editor

Dylan Crismale is a Digital Content Editor at WhistleOut, has been writing for almost a decade across a variety of Australian publications. He previously worked as a writer at Finder covering energy, internet and mobile plans. Dylan is passionate about finding the best deals to save people money and educating people about tech. When he's not sat at his desk Dylan loves working out, bingeing TV and hanging out with friends.​

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