February 13th 2020

Vietnam’s mobile subscribers experience the best Excellent Consistent Quality at 71.4%, when compared to users in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. This is according to the latest State of Mobile Networks report on the region from Tutela – a global crowdsourced mobile data company. The report used data from over 14 million devices (iOS and Android smartphones), including over 330 million speed tests, collected between July 1st and December 31st 2019.

After Vietnam, Malaysia placed second with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 64.0%. Excellent Consistent Quality is Tutela’s measure for how often a mobile operator provides its users with a connection that is suitable for a range of more intensive use cases such as 1080p video streaming, group HD video calls and realtime gaming. 

Vietnam:

Overall, Vietnam also had the fastest networks in the region on average, with a median of 10.6 Mbps. By operator, Viettel dominated in the country, winning in all five of the categories tested with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 79.1%, and a median download throughput of 13.4 Mbps. 

Thailand:

In Thailand, DTAC put in an impressive performance, coming top for both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality (52.3% and 83.0% respectively) and median download throughput (6.3 Mbps). TrueMove came top for median upload throughput (7.7 Mbps), while AIS had the lowest overall latency (25.3 ms). 

Malaysia:

On an operator basis, Maxis dominated across the board in Malaysia, taking the top spots for all five categories tested including the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in the country (80.2% – also the highest result for any single operator in this report) and highest median download throughput (16.0 Mbps). 

Philippines:

On an operator basis, there were wins for both Globe and Smart. Smart had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality (48.7%) and median download throughput (7.2 Mbps). However, Globe had the best Core Consistent Quality (85.4%), Tutela’s metric for representing day-to-day use cases such as social media usage, SD video streaming, and general web browsing.

Indonesia:

On an operator basis, Telkomsel came top across the board in Indonesia. The operator won in all five metrics tested, including Excellent Consistent Quality (73.4%) and median download throughput (11.3 Mbps). 

Other key findings from the report include:

• Although Indonesian networks are middle of the pack for the region overall, Telkomsel (Indonesia) is individually one of the best-performing operators in this report, and significantly outperforms all other Indonesian operators, and many of those from the other countries tested, on virtually every metric. 
• Vietnamese networks are the best overall, thanks to strong competition between the top three operators in the country, all of which provide above-average performance compared to the rest of the region. However, all operators in the country still have work left to do to convert more of their networks to 4G, with just 55.8% of consumers’ time spent on 4G rather than 3G – the lowest in the region. 
• In Thailand, smartphone subscribers’ mobile experience depends greatly on what kind of things they do with their smartphones. DTAC and TrueMove have virtually identical Core Consistent Quality percentages, indicating that their networks are on par for common use-cases like streaming SD video or browsing the internet. For Excellent Consistent Quality, a test geared more towards demanding use-cases like multiplayer online gaming, DTAC pulled significantly ahead. 

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela commented: “Countries in Southeast Asia are experiencing huge mobile traffic growth at a pace that outstrips much of the rest of the world. As such, it falls to operators to find a way to use their existing resources to deliver an outstanding mobile experience as consumers continue to demand even more from their mobile networks particularly for things like video streaming on the go. ”

The full report is available online here.