Strong showing from APME region for Opensignal's awards

Source: Opensignal. The top five leaders in the Asia Pacific region in the large land mass category for 5G availability included Jio from India, Vodafone in Australia, U Mobile and Maxis of Malaysia, as well as AIS in Thailand. The numbers show the percentage of time on 5G. Large land mass is defined as an area of over 200,000 sq km.

Opensignal has analysed the global 5G experience*, highlighting the best-performing operators and reflecting on the current state of 5G, in the 5G Global Mobile Network Experience Awards 2024 report. Report authors Sam Fenwick and Andrey Popov said in a statement that 5G users have a much better experience than on older mobile technologies.

"Thus far, much of the industry’s focus has been on improving download speeds. As 5G evolves, particularly with the development of 5G Advanced, attention will shift towards enhancing upload speed. In addition, 5G is already helping to reduce congestion, aided by the new spectrum bands it supports and its increased spectral efficiency compared to 4G," Fenwick and Popov said.

In Singapore, Singtel stood out as a 5G Global Leader across multiple categories, including Availability, Download Speed, Video Experience, and Games Experience. Opensignal's 5G Availability assesses the proportion of time 5G users spend on 5G — the higher the percentage, the more time users on a network have an active 5G connection. 

Malaysia also made significant strides in 5G deployment with U Mobile and Unifi, ranking among the top nations for overall user experience. According to Opensignal, this reflects its ongoing investments in expanding network infrastructure.

Singapore's M1 is a 5G Global Leader for 5G Availability, 5G Download Speed and 5G Games Experience and a 5G Global Rising Star for 5G Availability. Opensignal’s M1 5G users saw the proportion of time that they spend with an active 5G connection increase by 62.1% in relative terms between 1H23 and 1H24.

StarHub of Singapore is a 5G Global Leader for 5G Availability, 5G Download Speed, 5G Games Experience and 5G Voice App Experience. In addition, it is a top-15 operator in the small land mass group for year-on-year (YoY) improvement between 1H23 and 1H24 for 5G Availability, with a relative improvement of 32.5%.

Out of the 12 5G Global Leaders in the small land mass category, five are from the Middle East: Kuwait’s stc, Ooredoo and Zain; together with Bahrain’s Batelco and stc. Other 5G Global Leaders for 5G Availability included South Korea’s KT and SK telecom, along with Taiwan’s FarEasTone. 

Report highlights include:

Gaming excellence

Opensignal’s 5G Games Experience measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s 5G network. Measured on a scale of 0-100, Games Experience analyses how users’ multiplayer mobile gaming experience is affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter. 

Singapore's Singtel and csl Hong Kong topped the 5G Global Winners for 5G Games Experience in the small land mass group. In the large land mass group, U Mobile is the sole 5G Global Winner for 5G Games Experience, with 90.4 points on a 100-point scale.

Voice app experience

Two out of four of Japan’s operators — SoftBank and au — are 5G Global Winners for 5G Voice App Experience in the large land mass group. 5G Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger — over 5G connections using a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters. 

5G Download speed

In the small land mass group, LG U+ and SK telecom are joint 5G Global Winners.

Video experience

Singapore’s M1 is a 5G Global Winner for 5G Video Experience in the small land mass category. In the large land mass area group, the list includes Japan’s SoftBank, as well as Malaysia’s Unifi. Opensignal’s 5G Video Experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's 5G network. 

Relative improvement

The UAE’s du is in the top five for the relative improvement in its scores between 1H23 and 1H24 across three measures of the 5G Experience. 

Explore

Read the 5G Global Mobile Network Experience report at https://www.opensignal.com/2024/10/5g-global-mobile-network-experience-awards-2024

*The 5G experience was studied across the first 180 days of 2024 (January to June) using five key measures of the 5G experience. Top-scoring operators were named 5G Global Winners, while the runners-up have received the 5G Global Leaders accolade. In addition, the top five operators for each combination of land mass group and metric when it comes to how the 5G experience has changed year-on-year in relative terms have been called 5G Global Rising Stars.