February 25th 2020

StarHub and Singtel both excel in Tutela’s latest State of Mobile Networks report for Singapore. The report includes data from over 350,000 devices across Singapore, with over 10 million throughput tests and 49 billion total measurements collected between 1st July and 31st December 2019. The report benchmarked Singtel, StarHub and M1 as the three fully-commercially available networks in Singapore, with a separate case study on TPG and its current market-entry success.

Key findings from the report include:

• Starhub delivered the best Excellent Consistent Quality for Singapore with an impressive 90.7%, although all three of the big operators delivered an Excellent Consistent Quality in excess of 87%, meaning that the vast majority of the time, all three networks were good enough for uses cases such as 1080p video streaming, realtime mobile gaming or group HD video calls
• Singtel also had an impressive showing in the results; it performed best in both Core Consistent Quality and median download speed. A high result for Core Consistent Quality shows a network that reliably delivers the quality required day-to-day uses such as social media, SD video streaming and more
• TPG’s market-entry strategy of offering free SIM trials has no doubt succeeded in winning over subscribers to try the service. However, it is unclear if this will be successful in the long term. TPG users were 15 times more likely than those on other networks to be using a second SIM from another operator in their phone, and Tutela’s initial data suggests that performance on the TPG network does not currently rival the more established operators

“Singapore’s mobile networks are unlike almost any others,” commented Tom Luke, VP at Tutela. “While in many countries, the challenge is to ensure service delivery across both urban and rural areas, in Singapore it’s predominantly a case of managing congestion. Having nearly 8,000 people per square kilometre makes ensuring a high quality of service regardless of the time of day a huge challenge – but one that the established operators rise to admirably. It will be interesting to see how 5G affects this landscape when it starts to be rolled out later this year.”

The full report is available online here.