KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 20 ― Based on a new report released by Opensignal, Malaysia is currently lagging behind its peers Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia for telco reliability. The Opensignal Global Reliability Experience Report outlines the reliability of telcos in different parts of the world, and in it, Malaysia scored below most of its neighbours in Asean.

Based on Opensignal’s metrics, reliability is the extent to which users stay consistently connected to their mobile network and whether they can continue to do typical tasks like email, watching videos, and using navigation apps while still connected.

The Opensignal US Household Survey 2023 of 55,322 individuals saw mobile users appreciate reliable network services more than faster speeds. The respondents also consider Reliability second only to cost. 19 per cent of respondents point to Reliability as the key aspect of carrier evaluation while only 7 per cent point to upload/download speed as a major consideration.

How did Malaysia score?

In the report, Malaysia scored 790 points on a 100-1000 points scale, with 1000 being the most reliable. This puts the country ahead of the Philippines (787) and Saudi Arabia (745), but Indonesia (831), Thailand (841) and Singapore (867) are ahead in the rankings. Denmark (934), Japan (914) and South Korea (913) are the top three countries with the most reliable telcos in the world.

Opensignal noted that markets with higher growth rates of mobile customers have lower reliability scores. They also observed a negative correlation between a high proportion of prepaid connections in the market and Reliability Experience scores.

Some of the reasons that emerging market telcos are struggling to maintain highly reliable networks are two-fold: one, they need to make regular network investments to keep up with customers’ growing and rapidly evolving mobile data demands, and two, their networks are not built to anticipate the coverage and propagation requirements of new neighbourhoods and new construction.

At the same time, higher speeds also don’t mean better reliability. Opensignal sees that Reliability Experience scores grow at a much faster rate until the markets have average download speeds of up to 25Mbps. This impact diminishes for average speeds of 50Mbps and above.

In a nutshell, most of the telcos in emerging markets are just reacting rather than anticipating new demand and this means the companies are lagging in fulfilling the needs while telcos in mature markets are optimising and anticipating demand. Telcos in Malaysia will need to work harder to increase the reliability of their networks from now on to put the country ahead of peers in the region.

To learn more, check out the original report at OpenSignal. ― SoyaCincau