Opensignal: Unifi is now one of the fastest 5G telcos in the world

Opensignal has announced the winners of its annual 5G Global Mobile Network Experience Awards for 2023. Several Malaysian telcos have made it to the winner’s circle this year but the results might not be something that you may expect.

Before we move on further, do note that Opensignal has used a slightly different approach for this year’s 5G Global Awards. The network analytics company has now divided the telcos into two groups based on the land area of their markets.

Countries that have a land area of more than 200,000km² such as Malaysia are classified as Group I while the rest are positioned as Group II markets. This categorization was being done to acknowledge the fact that it is much harder to deploy a 5G network across a much larger land area.

To determine the winners of this year’s awards, Opensignal has analysed data that was captured from 1 January to 29 June 2023. With four categories on the line, the winners are deemed as the 5G Global Winners while the runner-ups are called the 5G Global Leaders.

In the 5G Download Speed category, TM’s Unifi emerged as one of the 5G Global Winner with an average speed of 407.4Mbps. Digi has also received the 5G Global Leader honour in this category with an average download speed of 384.1Mbps.

On the other hand, Digi has been deemed the best telco in the world when it comes to the 5G Games Experience. Opensignal has also listed Celcom and U Mobile in the 5G Global Leader list for this category.

None of the Malaysian telcos managed to get their hands on the 5G Global Winner title for the 5G Availability which was won by T-Mobile. However, Yes and U Mobile were still deemed as one of the category’s 5G Global Leaders.

Unfortunately, Malaysian telcos did not receive any awards when it comes to 5G Video Experience. While Digi was listed as one of the high-ranking telcos in the category, it is still a little behind 5G Global Winner and Leader recipients.

As part of its report, Opensignal didn’t forget to remind everyone that Malaysian users are currently benefitting from the relatively light load on Digital Nasional Berhad’s network. The company believed that this is partly due to the fact that Maxis only started to offer 5G access to customers in mid-August this year.

This is a rather interesting anecdote as Maxis was also the only telco that didn’t receive any accolades in Opensignal’s latest Mobile Experience Awards for Malaysia which was published last month. Nevertheless, expect things to change in the next 5G Global Awards as the country will be switching to a Dual 5G Network model next year.

That being said, there have been reports that the second 5G network is currently facing major challenges despite not being formally established just yet. We also have yet to hear any major announcement from the national 5G task force regarding this matter, so the true future of 5G in Malaysia is still largely uncertain at the moment.