Travelling right now is not possible as Malaysia announced a restriction of movement for the entire country from 18th March to 31st March 2020. With that being said, when travelling, roaming is definitely a thought that crosses the mind to stay connected. Of course, everyone wants the best deal for the most affordable price and of most importantly, a telco that provides the best data experience. Opensignal, a mobile networks analytics company, has revealed the best telco provider for Malaysian 4G users travelling to Singapore.
Out of the four largest operators in the country, Digi users apparently enjoyed the experience more as compared to the rest. Digi emerged as the winner on a few factors, download speed, upload speed and latency experience. They had also discovered key differences between mobile experience by Malaysian roamers in Singapore and domestic Singaporean users.
Malaysian service providers provide roaming services by having agreements with host networks. This will enable customers to stay connected abroad when they are connected to the their partner telco for that country. Digi and Maxis users typically roam on Singtel and StarHub whereas Celcom users mostly roam on M1 and StarHub. Meanwhile, U Mobile users typically roam on StarHub and Singtel.
The most notable element of the graph is that Singaporean domestic users download speed is higher than the Malaysian roamers. U Mobile has the least ideal experience of the lot as the download speed was a mere 16.6 Mbps while Digi users experienced the highest download speed at 46.8Mbps when roaming in Singapore. Taking second place is Maxis at 33.5Mbps, followed by Celcom at 30.9Mbps.
The upload speed for domestic Singaporean users is somewhat the same for all the providers. Digi again had the highest upload speed at 13.5 Mbps and U Mobile is the lowest at 7.3 Mbps. Maxis and Celcom also continues to maintain 2nd and 3rd place respectively.
Latency is measured in milliseconds and is essentially the response time that it takes to send information. The longer the time, the bigger the delay which isn’t ideal for applications like mobile gaming. From the graph above, Malaysian roamers experienced higher latencies than their Singaporean counterparts. Celcom observed the highest latency at 48.8ms which is almost double of what Singaporeans are getting, followed by Maxis at 42.2ms and U Mobile at 40.9ms. Digi has the lowest latency among the four at 36.4ms. This latest report was generated by Opensignal based on data obtained between 1st January to 31st December 2019.
Overall, it is evident that Digi offers the best experience for roaming in Singapore. On top of that, Digi has one of the most affordable roaming plans where you can get 2GB and 30 minutes of calls for RM25 for 3 days.
You can check out the full report here.
