Southeast Asia

Indonesia 

Telkomsel is the dominant mobile provider in Indonesia: its 192 million subscribers in 2018 gave it around 50% of the market share. It has used its resources to invest heavily in its 4G infrastructure, adding thousands of new cell towers per quarter.

The capital spend has clearly paid off: Telkomsel has the best coverage of any operator by far, and more impressively, the majority of its network is 4G. 3G mostly provides coverage off the main islands or deeply inland, with 4G present in all major population centres.

The remaining networks differ in their coverage: XL, for example, comes the closest to rivaling Telkomsel’s geographic coverage, but with greater reliance on 3G, while Smartfren has impressive 4G coverage on Java, but is limited in its coverage outside of major cities.

Philippines 

Although Smart has the edge over Global when it comes to speed, the story is reversed for coverage. Globe’s network appears to have both more 4G coverage and more geographic coverage overall.

Thailand 

All four operators have approximately similar geographic coverage, but the type of coverage is what sets them apart. AIS and TrueMove have 4G coverage across the majority of their networks, but DTAC and TOT rely much more heavily on 3G.

In the case of AIS and TrueMove, 4G appears to be present across almost all of their networks, although TrueMove does have an edge over AIS. Further exploration of the data reinforces this view: 74% of all connections by AIS customers are on 4G, while an impressive 87% of connections for TrueMove customers are on 4G. That compares favourably to the national average, which is just 59%. 

The reason why the national average is so low becomes clear when looking at DTAC and TOT’s networks. DTAC has a mixture of some 4G and 3G, while TOT’s network appears to rely entirely on 3G outside of the largest cities. TOT’s 4G coverage is entirely provided through a joint deal with DTAC to utilize the 2300 MHZ TDD spectrum, while DTAC also provides 4G coverage on 2100 MHz.