Users in Manila have a distinct mobile broadband speed advantage over their counterparts in other Filippino cities. In Opensignal's analysis of Download and Upload Speed Experience in five of the Philippines largest cities, we found that Manila beat out Angeles, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu and Davao in both metrics — in many cases by very large margins.
The Manila metro area is by far the largest urban zone in Manila, and we expect speeds to be faster in cities than in the country as a whole. But in this case, one city in the Philippines is much faster than the rest — and the differences in speed are quite large. Our users found that in Manila the average overall download speed of 11.6 Mbps was 47% faster than in Angeles, 73% faster than in Davao and Cebu and 81% better than in Cagayan de Oro.
In Upload Speed Experience the distance between Manila and the other cities wasn't quite as large, but it was still significant. Our users in Manila experienced overall upload speeds of 3.4 Mbps, which was 26% higher than the average Upload Speed Experience in Angeles and at least 36% higher than the average for Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro.
Operators typically focus their infrastructure and capacity upgrades in a country's largest cities as it allows them to target a large portion of their potential customer base in relatively compact areas. Also as wealthy and tech-savvy consumers are generally concentrated in cities, they make excellent candidates for the introduction of new services and technologies.
Manila isn't just the population center of the Philippines, it's the cultural, economic and political hub as well. But Angeles, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu and Davao are hardly small towns. They all, with the exception of Angeles, have metro-area populations well over 1 million; they're all important regional business hubs; and many of them serve as the administrative centers of their regions. The Philippines clearly has two tiers of speed when it comes to urban areas: there's Manila and there's everyone else.
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