Smart beats Globe in mobile network experience

MANILA, Philippines — PLDT wireless unit Smart Communications has again topped its rival Globe Telecom in various metrics for mobile network experience, according to mobile analytics firm OpenSignal.

In OpenSignal’s latest mobile network experience report for the Philippines covering the November 2019 to January 2020 period, Smart beat Globe in terms of download speed experience, upload speed experience, video experience, games experience, voice app experience, and 4G availability.

The two mobile network providers were tied in the latency experience metric.

“Despite having just two mobile operators, the Philippines’ mobile market continues to be fairly dynamic and we have seen improvements to both operator networks,” OpenSignal said.

OpenSignal said Smart is still the operator to beat when it comes to video experience with its score increasing 15.6 percent from the previous report released last September.

The improvement in Smart’s score puts it in the “fair” category, which means video experience for users is acceptable at lower resolutions.

Globe likewise saw its video experience score increase 30.6 percent, but OpenSignal said this is still within the “poor” category, which means users find streaming video nearly unwatchable.

OpenSignal said both operators made some strides in download speed experience, but Smart was ahead with users experiencing an overall download speed of 10.6 Mbps, which is three Mbps faster than its rival Globe.

Smart was also better in upload speed experience with speeds of 3.9 Mbps, while that of Globe came in at two Mbps.

“Despite both operators’ improvements in upload speed, they are still well below the speeds we see in most developed markets, which are typically more than 10 Mbps,” OpenSignal said.

The report also showed that users were able to access a 4G connection on Smart’s 4G network 81.8 percent of the time, while Globe followed closely with 77.8 percent.

In terms of voice app experience, Smart won with a score of 64.8, while Globe was slightly behind with a score of 64.

However, OpenSignal said both of these scores fall into the very poor category, which means there’s a lot of opportunity for the operators to reduce call quality impairments such as distortion, clicking sounds and silence.

OpenSignal said it also measured the gaming experience in the Philippines for the first time and learned that playing multiplayer games in the country is challenging.