March 9th 2021

In Tutela’s 2021 South East Asia State of Mobile Experience report, Singapore dominated in a majority of the metrics tested when comparing the network experience of subscribers on each country’s major mobile network operators. Singapore had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in South East Asia, with 84.5% of connections having a network experience suitable for use-cases like 1080p video streaming, real-time mobile gaming and HD video calling. It also had the highest Core Consistent Quality in the region at 94.4%. 

Consistent Quality is a set of metrics that Tutela has developed to objectively evaluate when connections are (or are not) enabling users to do the things they want to on their mobile devices. There are two sets of thresholds, Excellent and Core. A connection that hits the Excellent threshold is sufficient for use-cases like 1080p video streaming, HD video calling and multiplayer gaming, while a Core connection should be sufficient to stream standard-definition video or handle day-to-day activities like web browsing or uploading photos to social media. The percentages seen in this report represent the percentage of tests for subscribers on a given operator that were above the Excellent or Core thresholds.

By operator, Starhub won for both Excellent and Core Consistent Quality at 87.3% and 95.3% respectively, StarHub also won in a further two of the seven metrics tested with the fastest download speed at 33.7 Mbps, and most responsive network with a one-way latency of 8.4 ms. Singtel won in three of the seven metrics tested, with the fastest median upload speed at 16.7 Mbps, and both the best 5G/4G coverage and total coverage.

The report was released by Tutela Technologies, a global crowdsourced mobile data company, and evaluated over 55 million speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between August 1st and January 31st, 2021. 

Other key findings from the regional report were as follows:

• In some countries, a clearly dominant operator emerged: Telkomsel won six out of seven categories in Indonesia, and a similar story emerged for Smart in the Philippines, and Viettel Mobile in Vietnam. In other countries, however, the top spot was shared between multiple operators across the different metrics tested, such as StarHub and Singtel in Singapore. 
• While Singapore was able to sweep the top spot, Vietnam was able to comfortably take second place for most metrics — surprising, given that the country is still relatively dependent on older 3G networks. 
• Many of the countries in the region have up-and-coming operators, which have notably different spectrum holdings and deployment strategies to other operators — Smartfren in Indonesia and DTAC in Thailand are notable examples. They are currently behind the competition when it comes to mobile experience and performance, but the changes on the horizon with 5G deployment could provide an opportunity for these challenger networks to outmanoeuvre the incumbents. 

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela said: “In such a geographically small and highly advanced nation, mobile users expect near-perfect mobile experience all of the time – and the test results were strong for all operators.  However, what surprised us was that there was a clear lead for one operator – StarHub – which took nearly a 4-point lead ahead of Singtel for Excellent Consistent Quality, indicating that its subscribers are getting a better experience more often. As 5G rollouts continue and more 5G-capable devices become available, all of this could change in the coming months and we look forward to seeing the impact that this has on the results for all operators.”

The full report is available here.