Oi users have observed significant increases across speed and availability after they migrated to their new networks, still under a roaming-like model, Opensignal said in its latest report.
The sale of Oi’s mobile unit to its competitors — Claro, TIM and Vivo — was finalized in April 2022, for BRL 15.9 billion ($3.4 billion).
TIM has gained 14.5 million Oi’s customers, while Claro added 11.6 million and Vivo added 10.5 million — with the subscribers being assigned to new networks based on a geographical split.
Opensignal looked at how the transfer of Oi subscribers impacted the experience of users that subscribe to the other operators. While TIM and Vivo’s networks unaffected, Claro users have observed a dip in their average 4G Download Speed and LTE RSRQ values, indicating increased congestion.
In the last Opensignal Brazil Mobile Network Experience report with Oi results included, users on this network experienced average download and upload speeds substantially lagging behind their peers on other networks.
However, when comparing two data collection periods — before the sale was finalized in mid-April (90 days starting on Feb 1, 2022) and six months later (90 days starting on Aug 1, 2022) with the migration already in progress — there was boosts of around 50 percent of average download and upload speeds. Oi users enjoyed 4.6 Mbps faster average download speeds and 1.9 Mbps faster average upload speeds after being migrated to their new networks.
Oi users observed significant improvements across all observed availability metrics. Time spent with no mobile signal reduced for them by a sixth in the analyzed data collection periods, from 4.1 percent to 3.4 percent.
Oi users also spent substantially more time connected to 4G and 5G services, seeing an impressive boost of 13.8 percentage points, to nearly 70 percent in August-October 2022. This means an increase of nearly a quarter of time spent on 4G and 5G services, compared to the period of February-April 2022.
Oi users had a better experience when streaming videos, playing multiplayer mobile games, or using over-the-top voice services on their smartphones after the migration.
