KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 26 — Local telecommunications service provider, U Mobile, was fastest overall in terms of download and upload speeds across six major networks nationwide, according to a recently published mobile analytic report.
In global analytics company Opensignal’s latest Mobile Network Experience Report, U Mobile came in first place with a score of 39.4Mbps — an increase of 21.2Mbps since last year when it had placed last.
U Mobile also won the upload speed experience category outright with its score of 9.9Mbps, due to its smaller, but still impressive, boost in score of 2Mbps (25.8 per cent) from last year’s report.
“U Mobile now wins the overall Download Speed Experience award all to itself — this is a change from the previous report, when Celcom won the award outright. U Mobile wins with a score of 39.4Mbps — 1.7Mbps (4.5 per cent) ahead of Unifi, which now takes second place.
“U Mobile’s explosive increase in average download speed is noteworthy — the operator’s 5G download speed has shot up 63.3 per cent, while its overall Download Speed Experience has more than doubled at 115.7 per cent,” it said.
Previous winner Celcom came in fifth this year, beating out Yes who had to settle for last.
Download speed experience, which is measured in Mbps, represents the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across an operator’s mobile data networks.
However, Unifi wins the consistent quality award outright with a score of 67.2 per cent, 4.8 percentage points above second-placed Digi’s score of 62.4 per cent followed by Maxis, U Mobile, Yes and Celcom finishing third, fourth, fifth and last place respectively.
Consistent quality is a measure of how sufficient the network is in supporting common mobile application requirements at a level that is “good enough” for users to maintain (or complete) various typical demanding tasks on their devices.
“Different experience indicators such as download speed, upload speed, latency, jitter, packet discard, and time to first byte are combined to calculate consistent quality.
“These components are evaluated against thresholds recommended by various more demanding common applications used for a range of common tasks,” the report said.
As for overall availability, Yes is the reigning champion after winning the award for a fourth consecutive time with a near-perfect score of 99 per cent.
The report defined availability as a measure of what proportion of time people have a network connection in the places they most commonly frequent, instead of a network’s geographical extent.
“This means that users on Yes’ network proportionally spend 99 per cent of their time with a 3G or better connection.
“U Mobile is 0.8 percentage points lower in second place, and all six Malaysian national operators score above 95 per cent,” it said.
Awards for other categories included video experience, live video experience, voice app experience and 5G experience.
Maxis was the only contender that missed out in any of the categories.
Opensignal said data collection for the latest iteration ran over a period of 90 days between June 1 and August 28 this year to see how they stack up on different aspects of mobile experience.
The full report can be accessed here.
