Opensignal said, in a report out today, that this means their download speeds are slower – down to as little as a third as what they’d get with a strong signal.
Robert Wyrzykowski, senior industry analyst at Opensignal, says 50% of his 5G readings in Switzerland showed power levels as “weak” or worse, compared with 38.3-39.7% in the neighbouring countries.
“As a result, our Swiss users experienced a comparatively diminished 5G mobile experience,” said Wyrzykowski.
Switzerland – which is not a member of the European Union (EU) – “has particularly tight regulations on mobile network electromagnetic emissions which have proved controversial among Swiss operators”, he added in his report.
He carried out his study between the beginning of January and the end of March this year.
“We observed that Switzerland had a worse signal strength than other analysed European markets: -105.9dBm on average. This was significantly lower than in Germany, France and Italy, where it varied between -101.1 and -100.5dBm.”
“Because of Switzerland’s electromagnetic field regulations, we expected to see significantly lower average signal strength in the country,” his report says. “Power level regulations for mobile base stations in Switzerland are one of the strictest in the world.” They are only a tenth of the limit set by the EU.
“The signal strength deteriorated substantially for devices farther away from cell sites across all countries in our analysis,” said Wyrzykowski. “Still, our users in Switzerland on average saw signal strength 5.4dBm worse than in Germany, 6.3dBm lower than in France and 6.5dBm lower than in Italy.”