Mobile Networks Update: Philippines (September 2017)

It's been six months since Opensignal first visited the Philippines making it time for our semi-annual update on the country. For our Mobile Networks Update report, we've tracked the changes we've seen in our 3G and 4G measurements for Smart and Globe over the last six months.

  • As it did six months ago, Globe led in 4G availability. Our users were able to latch onto Globe's LTE signals more than 62.6% of the time. Both operators, however, saw sizable improvements in their availability scores since the spring. Smart's availability jumped 12 percentage points in our measurements, while Globe's availability increased more than 7 percentage points.
  • 3G and 4G Speeds remained steady for both operators since our last report. Smart held onto Opensignal's 4G speed award with an average download of 10.6 Mbps, increasing slightly over the last six months. Meanwhile both operators again drew for the 3G prize. In general, speeds in the Philippines remain slow, well below both the global 4G average of 16.2 Mbps and the global 3G average of 4.4 Mbps, as measured in our recent State of LTE report.
  • While we recorded a tie for overall speed six months ago, Smart claimed the award outright in our latest test period. By virtue of the big increase in its availability score, Smart was able to deliver its faster LTE connections to customers more often, leading to an overall speed of 4.2 Mbps in our measurements.

Opensignal Awards Table

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Download Speed: Overall Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

Globe

medal medal medal

Smart

medal medal medal medal medal

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Enjoyed our report? All our analysis is based on real measurements collected by millions of mobile network users. No simulations, no approximations: just real-world experience.

Performance by Metric

Download Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: 3G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: Overall

This metric shows the average download speed experienced by Opensignal users across all of an operator's 3G and 4G networks. Overall speed doesn't just factor in 3G and LTE speeds, but also the availability of each network technology. Operators with lower LTE availability tend to have lower overall speeds because their customers spend more time connected to slower 3G networks.

Latency: 4G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Latency: 3G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Availability: 4G

This metric shows the proportion of time Opensignal users have an LTE connection available to them on each operator’s network. It's a measure of how often users can access a 4G network rather than a measure of geographic or population coverage.

Our Methodology

Opensignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 3 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide.

Our measurements are collected at all hours of the day, every day of the year, under conditions of normal usage, including inside buildings and outdoors, in cities and the countryside, and everywhere in between. By analyzing on-device measurements recorded in the places where subscribers actually live, work and travel, we report on mobile network service the way users truly experience it.

For this particular report, 1,048,336,696 datapoints were collected from 62,502 users during the period: 2017-05-01 - 2017-07-31.

We continually adapt our methodology to best represent the changing experience of consumers on mobile networks and, therefore, comparisons of the results to past reports should be considered indicative only. For more information on how we collect and analyze our data, see our methodology page.

For every metric we've calculated statistical confidence intervals and plotted them on all of the graphs. When confidence intervals overlap for a certain metric, our measured results are too close to declare a winner in a particular category. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.

Opensignal Limited retains ownership of this report including all intellectual property rights, data, content, graphs & analysis. Reports 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.