Mobile users in Indonesia have a good chance of finding an LTE signal regardless of operator choice, but 4G download speeds remain among lowest worldwide.
In our first report measuring mobile experience in the country, we analysed over 9 billion measurements from close to 1 million devices comparing the performance of the five national operators in terms of 4G availability, 3G and 4G download speeds, and latency.
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Our analysis found Indonesia’s LTE availability to be impressively high. But without doubt, the clear winner of this award went to Smartfren, whose users were able to connect to an LTE signal in 9 out of 10 attempts. Among the other operators 3, Telkomsel and XL all offered availability over 70% of the time in our tests, and even the lowest-ranked, Indosat was able to provide its users with an LTE connection 67% of the time.
Looking at download speeds, the race was less even. Telkomsel took our awards for all three download speed metrics we track: 3G, 4G and overall download speed, with a big lead in nearly every category. Our users on Telkomsel’s network experienced an average 4G download speed of 14.6 Mbps, while none of the other operators managed to hit the 10Mbps mark. As for Indosat, our users could barely manage a 4G download speed above 3 Mbps, which is slower than the 3G speeds we tested on Telkomsel’s network (5.6 Mbps).
But even the highest average download speed couldn’t match the average global speed we published in our State of LTE report, standing at 16.6 Mbps. This trend is fairly common in SouthEast Asia, where in many cases we saw high 4G accessibility coupled with staggeringly slow speeds. Such disparity is in many cases an indication of a country focused on expanding its LTE reach rather than providing powerful speeds.
Our final metrics, 3G and 4G latency, measure the delay time users experience while on a given network. Once again, Telkomsel won our awards for both 4G and 3G latency with average response times of 44.3 milliseconds and 88.8ms respectively.
For the full analysis including a regional performance breakdown on the largest metropolitan areas have a look at our report: State of Mobile Networks: Indonesia (December 2017).
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