Mobile Networks Update: Myanmar (October 2018)

In the six months since Opensignal published its first State of Mobile Networks report for Myanmar, much has changed in the emerging 4G state. The country now has four mobile operators, up from just three, as Viettel flipped the the switch on its new 4G service Mytel in June. In just a short time, Mytel has become highly competitive, signing up 2 million subscribers in its first month. Mytel is also having an impact in our metrics, jumping to the top of our 4G availability rankings, but we see established operator Ooredoo asserting itself as the leader in our speed analysis. In Opensignal's first Mobile Networks Update for Myanmar, we parsed 128 million measurements collected from 14,687 devices from July 1 to Sept. 28, 2018 to see how the country's four mobile operators stacked up in 3G and 4G mobile user experience.

  • In our last report, we recorded nearly 30 Mbps average LTE download speeds for MPT, Ooredoo and Telenor. Fast speeds are common for a young LTE market as networks tend to be lightly loaded, but as more consumers fill up those networks, speeds tend to fall. That's exactly the trend we're seeing in Myanmar. MPT's and Telenor's 4G download speeds both fell below 25 Mbps in our measurements over the last six months. Ooredoo, however, was able to hold its 4G download speed score steady, averaging connections of 29.9 Mbps and winning our 4G download award.
  • Ooredoo also wound up winning our overall download speed award outright with an average connection speed of 19.9 Mbps across its 3G and 4G networks. In addition, it was tied for the lead in our 4G upload and 3G download speed awards in this test period, even though MPT and Telenor won those respective awards in our last report.
  • Mytel debuted in our 4G metrics in last place in most categories. The one major exception was 4G availability where it grabbed the lead with an impressive score of 90.3%. Though Mytel is only a few months old, a high level of LTE reach is to be expected from the operator as it has no 3G networks to fall back on. We saw improvements in 4G availability from the other three operators, though, and every one of Myanmar's national players can now boast of availability scores higher than 70%.

Opensignal Awards Table

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

MPT

medal

Mytel

medal

Ooredoo

medal medal medal medal

Telenor

medal medal medal medal

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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.

Upload Speed: 4G

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

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.

Latency: Overall

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on all types of 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, 128,307,252 datapoints were collected from 14,687 users during the period: 2018-07-01 - 2018-09-28.

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.

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