Singapore

Singtel became the first Singaporean operator to move past the 90% mark in our 4G Availability metric. Its score of 91.2% was nearly 2 percentage points ahead of its rivals, landing it our 4G Availability award. But M1 and StarHub are on the cusp of reaching the same milestone with 4G Availability scores of 89.4% and 89.2% respectively.

In the last year, all three of Singapore operators' 4G reach has improved considerably. The biggest improvement came from StarHub, which saw its 4G Availability score jump by more than 6 percentage points since our May 2018 report. The fact that we see any growth in this metric at all shows that even with highly advanced 4G infrastructures — and a pending shift to 5G technology — Singapore's operators are still invested in improving the mobile broadband experience.

Video Experience measures the quality of video streamed to mobile devices, and while we did find two operators, Singtel and M1, tied for the win in this category, all of Singapore's service providers excelled in this metric. All three earned Very Good ratings (65-75) in our 1-100 point Video Experience scale, meaning video streamed to our users' devices exhibited short load times and few interruptions during playback at both high and low resolutions.

When we break down Video Experience by connection type, we find that video quality in Singapore enters a whole new class. In 4G Video Experience, both Singtel and M1 garnered Excellent scores (75-100), which is our highest possible video rating. StarHub was less than a point shy of achieving an Excellent 4G Video Experience rating as well. Even when no 4G connection was available to our users, Singaporeans still found decent video quality on HSPA networks. All three operators had Fair ratings in 3G Video Experience (40-55), meaning our users were typically able to stream video at lower resolutions without excessive loading times or stalling.

Singapore is among the fastest countries in the world in our Download Speed Experience metric, but Singtel managed to distinguish itself, winning our award in this category with an average overall download speed of 42.5 Mbps. In our last report, StarHub won the Download Speed Experience crown, but in the last six months the operator's score fell by more than 2 Mbps while Singtel's score rose by more than 4 Mbps.

Singtel was also the only operator of the three to provide our users with 4G Download Speeds greater than 50 Mbps, which was one of the keys to its Download Speed Experience victory. But 4G Download Speeds on all three operators' networks were exceptionally fast, with connections all above 40 Mbps.

M1 took home Opensignal's Upload Speed Experience award as it was able to provide our users with overall upstream connection speeds of 13.4 Mbps. All three operators, however, had impressive scores in this metric. Today's mobile broadband networks heavily favor download over upload speeds, making Upload Speed Experience scores greater than 10 Mbps quite rare. All three Singapore operators, however, scored over 12 Mbps in this metric.

4G was definitely driving those high Upload Speed Experience scores. 3G Upload Speeds were roughly one-tenth of 4G Upload Speeds across Singapore's operators in our measurements, and on Singtel and M1's networks, our users were able to tap into 4G Upload Speeds greater than 15 Mbps. Singapore will only benefit from such powerful upstream connections as consumers shift their mobile data usage toward social sharing, online gaming and video communications services that require fast upload speeds.

As Opensignal has noted before, one of Singapore's greatest strengths is the responsiveness of its networks. Latency is a measure of how long a data request takes to traverse the network and return, and it has become an increasingly important metric in Singapore given consumers’ growing embrace of services like real-time multiplayer gaming, VoIP and video chat, which all require low latency connections. The high water mark in Latency Experience for the current generation of mobile broadband networks is around 30 milliseconds, and two of Singapore's operators have bettered it.

M1 had the lowest (best) Latency Experience score in our measurements at 27.9ms, but Singtel was less than a millisecond behind with a score of 28.6ms. Though StarHub was above the 30ms mark, with a score of 34.6ms, its connections still rate among the most responsive in the world.