Singapore tops Southeast Asian rankings for mobile data throughput

Source: Ericsson South East Asia and Oceania regional Ericsson Mobility Report.

Singapore is the only Southeast Asian country with “cell edge” (worst case scenario) downlink throughput that is fast enough to assure a smooth delivery of high-bandwidth applications – such as video streaming – to consumers on their mobile devices, says Ericsson.

Singapore is also the first and only country in the region to have smartphone subscription penetration of more than 100%, according to the latest edition of the Ericsson South East Asia and Oceania regional Ericsson Mobility Report*, published November 2015.

Networks in both Singapore and Australia have also reached a point where the threshold of 2 Mbps required for high definition video streaming can be delivered anywhere there is mobile network coverage**. Higher downlink speeds help operators improve app coverage – defined as the geographical area where an app works as expected – to their customers. App coverage is often used by operators to connect the user experience to their network performance KPIs.

Singapore and Australia offer the best network performance, due to their leadership in deploying LTE and LTE-Advanced infrastructure. LTE adoption also helps increase app coverage for operators. Singapore has already reached 100% population coverage with LTE while Australia has reached 90%. By the end of 2015 LTE will represent around 40% of total mobile subscriptions in Australia and 50% in Singapore. In both countries, this number will have increased to around 80% by 2018.

”As societies become more connected, communications are increasingly app-centric and consequently, high expectations are placed on network performance,” says Nicholas Seow, President of Ericsson Singapore and Brunei. "This is significant as one of the most demanding apps in terms of performance – video streaming – will account for almost 70% of all global mobile data traffic by 2021. Different countries will face different app coverage challenges depending on the apps users are consuming.

"Singapore’s regional leadership in network performance has been clear for a few years now as evidenced in our latest reports. With nation-wide LTE-Advanced coverage and a growing ecosystem of compatible devices becoming available to Singaporeans, we can only expect this trend to continue.”

Source: Ericsson South East Asia and Oceania regional Ericsson
Mobility Report.

The report adds that:

• Mobile subscriptions in the Southeast Asia and Oceania region will exceed 1 billion by the end of 2015, accounting for about 14% of the total global market
• Smartphone subscriptions are expected to more than double in the next six years and reach around 850 million by 2021. The amount of data used monthly by each active smartphone will increase substantially from an average of 1.2 GB in 2015 to approximately 9 GB by 2021.
• Population coverage for LTE will be more than 75% by 2021. The transition from 3G to 4G will help operators to cope with the predicted data traffic growth and deliver faster uplink and downlink speeds. 
• LTE/5G subscriptions are forecast to gain momentum and surpass 500 million by 2021, driven by 3G migration and new services like VoLTE (Voice over LTE).

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*This South East Asia and Oceania Report is a supplement to the global Ericsson Mobility Report, and shares the differences across the South East Asia and Oceania region, including smartphone uptake, mobile broadband plans, and network performance.

**Analysis performed by Ericsson based on Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence Data from Speedtest.net