Vietnam comes top in five out of eight measures of the mobile experience across five of the largest ASEAN countries by population and is in second place for Core Consistent Quality. Thailand places first in three categories and second in a further three. In contrast, The Philippines is in last place in five measures and second to last in a further two categories. Vietnam’s Download Speed Experience score was 9.5 Mbps (57.1%) faster than the Philippines.
In this analysis, Opensignal has compared the mobile experience of users across ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) markets with a population of 30 million or higher. We have excluded Myanmar from this analysis, because of the ongoing disruption following the February 2021 coup.
Vietnam is ahead of the pack for both Video Experience and Games Experience. It has the highest score for video streaming with an impressive lead of 9.5 points over Indonesia and comes top for Games Experience with a winning margin of 5.8 points on average ahead of Malaysia and Thailand’s statistically tied scores of 64.5-64.7 points on a 100 point scale.
Thailand and the Philippines were the only countries analyzed that placed in the Poor (under 40) category for Video Experience. The others all placed one category higher, with a Fair (40-55) experience. A Poor rating means that our users did not have a good experience even for lower resolution videos across all providers. Very slow loading times and frequent stalling were common.
Vietnam was the only country to place in the Fair (65-75) category for users’ experience when playing multiplayer mobile games over connections (Games Experience). Our Filipino users’ Games Experience was the worst out of all five markets, and placed in the Poor (40-65) category alongside Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. The Philippines was 14.8 points behind Indonesia and 22.7 points behind Vietnam.
As with Video Experience and Games Experience, Vietnam has the highest score for Excellent Consistent Quality — with a lead of 7.7 percentage points over second placed Thailand. However, Thailand takes the top spot for Core Consistent Quality with a margin of 3.4 percentage points over Vietnam.
Malaysia and Filipino users occupy the last two places for the two measures of consistent quality. The Philippines is only ahead of Malaysia for Excellent Consistent Quality and just avoids last place. However, it is in last place for Core Consistent Quality. Excellent Consistency Quality is the percentage of users’ tests that met the minimum recommended thresholds for users to watch HD video, complete group video conference calls and play games. Core Consistent Quality uses thresholds for lower performance applications including SD video, voice calls and web browsing.
On Availability, our users in Thailand spent the most time with a 3G or better connection, coming top with a score of 99.1% and a lead of 2.5 percentage points over their neighbors in Malaysia. The Philippines comes last for Availability — trailing Indonesia by 1.3 percentage points and being 5.2 percentage points behind the front-runner, Thailand.
Thai users also spent the least amount of time without a cellular signal (0.5%). This is half the time that users in Malaysia spent without signal, and approximately a third of the time compared with users in the Philippines (1.4%) and Indonesia (1.5%).
A contributing factor to the Philippines and Indonesia’s positions in both charts is the fact that they are both archipelagos. Rolling out mobile services across fragmented islands is considerably more logistically challenging than deploying networks across contiguous markets on a mainland.
Vietnam comes top for Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience. Our Vietnamese users saw average download speeds that were 9.5 Mbps (57.1%) faster than the speeds seen by Filipino users. The Philippines is in second place for Download Speed Experience — its best showing across all eight categories. 5G is an important factor here, given the extreme uplift in download speeds it can provide.
Vietnam’s Upload Speed Experience score was 1.6 Mbps (21.9%) faster than the score in second placed Thailand. Our users in the Philippines saw the slowest average upload speeds — 3.7 Mbps. Indonesia and Thailand’s Upload Speed Experience scores were 1.9-2 times higher than the Philippines’, while our Vietnamese users’ scores were 2.4 times those of Filipino users.
How the overall mobile experience of our users in these countries will evolve will greatly depend on the rate of 5G adoption in each market. Markets where operators drive a greater proportion of time that users spend with an active 5G connection (5G Availability) will boost the overall experience because 5G can generate large uplifts in the mobile experience.
Opensignal Limited retains ownership of this insight including all intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis. Reports and insights produced by Opensignal Limited may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed, published for any commercial purpose (including use in advertisements or other promotional content) without prior written consent. Journalists are encouraged to quote information included in Opensignal reports and insights provided they include clear source attribution. For more information, contact [email protected].