It has been more than 5 years since 4G LTE was officially rolled out in Malaysia. Today, there are six 4G LTE operators in the country and the cost of data is so much more affordable than before.
As more users are switching to 4G thanks to a wide range of affordable smartphones, can our mobile networks cope with the rising demand for data? OpenSignal, which crowdsource network performance data from smartphone users have just published their latest report specifically for Malaysia. This is their third report and you probably won’t be surprised with the results.
According to their findings, Maxis is the clear winner when it comes to 4G and overall download speeds. The green telco is the only player to exceed 20Mbps in their 4G download tests and this was also the case in the previous OpenSignal report that was released in October 2017. When it comes to overall download speed which includes both 4G and 3G, Maxis is still on top with an average of 16.96Mbps.
While Maxis has the best 4G latency of 39.58ms, U Mobile does it better in the 3G category with a latency of 92.7ms. However, when it comes to 4G availability, which is basically how often a user is connected to 4G, Yes is still #1 at 92.47% and they have the #2 spot for overall download speed at 15.7Mbps.
In Kuala Lumpur, OpenSignal says that Yes users are able to stay connected to 4G 93.2% of the time. It is worth pointing out that Yes is a pure 4G network and it doesn’t have a backup 3G network like other telcos. This means Yes users will either get 4G or no signal at all.
Taking third place for overall download speed is Celcom at 11.65Mbps followed by Digi at 8.44Mbps. In 5th place is U Mobile at 6.23Mbps and in the last place is Unifi (formerly known as webe) at 5.09Mbps. Despite being the lowest performer, OpenSignal noted that Unifi has increased its 4G availability by 10% since its last report. In this quarter, Unifi has a 4G availability of 75.52%, beating Digi (75.26%) and U Mobile (62.48%).
OpenSignal has emphasised that 4G availability doesn’t represent geographical or population coverage. It’s basically a measurement of how often a user can stay connected to 4G on their smartphones.
You can check out the full breakdown below:
The latest report has the biggest sample size yet with 1,208,027,137 data points from 101,302 users taken between 1 December 2017 to 28 February 2018. In 2017, the sample size was 1,075,460,959 data points from 75,288 users and in 2016, it was 39,621,885 data points from 21,109 users.
To be part of OpenSignal’s analysis, just make sure you have the app installed on your smartphone which is available on both AppStore and Google Play. Apart from testing your network’s real world speed and getting a breakdown of your network connectivity, the OpenSignal app will also show you the average performance of each network in your area.
You can read the full OpenSignal report here.
What do you think of this report? Does it reflect your actual experience? Let us know in the comments below.
