Which thresholds apply to the traffic lights?

The threshold values for the evaluation are shown regardless of your Internet access (regardless whether testing is carried out with a WLAN, a browser, 2G/EDGE, 3G/UMTS/HSPA, 4G/LTE or 5G/NR smart phone). The colours give a general indication whether the quality is sufficient for the majority of applications on the Internet.

There is no generally accepted definition of “sufficient” bandwidth; the subjective perception of the necessary speed depends on the type of application used.

The red/orange/green scale is irrespective of the technology in question and refers to the measured data rate solely. However, very high data rates can only be achieved by certain technologies such as LTE or NR. Therefore a red result is not necessarily a bad result if the region you are testing provides only a 2G-connection. With some technologies it is not possible to achieve a green-light result (e.g. with EDGE or ISDN Internet access).

RTR’s experts selected the following threshold values:

ParameterDark green
GreenYellowRed
Datarate downlink
≥ 100 MBit/s
≥ 10 MBit/s
≥ 5 MBit/s
< 5 MBit/s
Datarate uplink
≥ 50 MBit/s
≥ 5 MBit/s
≥ 2.5 MBit/s
< 2.5 MBit/s
Ping (two way latency)
≤ 10 ms
≤ 25 ms
≤ 75 ms
> 75 ms
Signal 2G/3G (GSM/UMTS)
≥ -75 dBm
≥ -85 dBm
≥ -101 dBm
< -101 dBm
Signal 3G/4G (LTE/NR)
≥ -85 dBm
≥ - 95 dBm
≥ -111 dBm
<  -111 dBm
WLAN≥ -51 dBm≥ -61 dBm≥ -76 dBm< -76 dBm