Malaysia

Celcom held on to our national 4G Availability award as our users on its network were, on average, connected to 4G services more than 87% of the time.

In the last six months, our users in Malaysia saw small improvements in 4G Availability on most operators’ mobile networks. But users on Maxis were an exception as its score dipped by a tiny half a percentage point ending up at 82.7%. While we saw DiGi inching closer to 80% 4G Availability, Unifi passed this mark with an improvement of 2 percentage points to give Maxis a good chase for the second position with a score of 81.2%. Although U Mobile’s score of 72.3% was at least 6 percentage points lower than its incumbents, it showed a stellar improvement in this metric — a significant increase of more than 7 percentage points since our last report.

With Malaysian operators approaching 80% to 90% 4G Availability, and regulator MCMC opening a consultation on the allocation of new spectrum bands, these events signify that Malaysia’s 4G network experience is rapidly reaching maturity.

In our one-of-its-kind Video Experience category, three of Malaysia's operators garnered a Good rating (55-65) in our 100-point Video Experience scale. Celcom earned the award with 63.5 points while Maxis trailed the winner closely with 62.1 points. DiGi moved up into our Good category, as the operator saw its score increase by more than 7.2% to 56.2 points. A Good rating means that while users do experience waiting times before a video begins playing, and some interruptions in playback, low-resolution video streaming is generally consistent.

Our users on U Mobile’s and Unifi’s networks saw the highest improvement in Video Experience — a jump of almost 30% and 20% respectively — in the past six months, upgrading both the operators’ ratings from Poor (0-40) to Fair (40-55). Although U Mobile was the biggest gainer in this category, it still landed in the last place with a score of 40.3 points — a difference of at least 4 points from Unifi’s score of 44.6 points.

In this report, for the very first time Opensignal quantified the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile networks in Malaysia. Our brand new measure of Voice App Experience ranks operators on a scale of 0-100 using a mean opinion score (MOS) model derived from an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters.

We saw all five Malaysian operators vying for our new Voice App Experience award, with four out of five major operators earning an Acceptable rating (74-80) on the 100-point scale. Unifi was well ahead of its rivals with an award-winning score of 78 points, backed by low packet loss and core network capabilities. There was a close competition for second place, which was jointly shared by Maxis and Celcom with a score of 75 points — just one point ahead of Digi’s score.

An Acceptable rating means users were satisfied. Typically, they would have experienced some perceptible call quality impairments with a short duration of distortion but were generally able to comprehend without repetition. U Mobile was the only operator to earn Poor ratings, which means many of our users would be dissatisfied, and likely experienced significant call quality impairments.

We saw a wide range of scores in our Download Speed Experience category. Our users on Maxis’ award-winning network experienced an overall download speed of 17.7 Mbps — at least three times faster than our users on Unifi’s network who experienced an overall speed of 5.4 Mbps. We also saw some impressive improvements in this category within the last six months, while users on Celcom saw a sprint of 1.5 Mbps with an attempt to challenge Maxis. It was noteworthy that U Mobile’s overall score grew by a stunning 3.3 Mbps to 7.5 Mbps — a boost of more than 75% — to overtake Unifi and close the gap with Digi’s score of 11.1 Mbps.

When we look at Malaysia's download speed experience split by technology, we see a similar diversity in the 4G Download Speed scores. While Celcom and Maxis’ users experienced 4G Download Speeds well above 15 Mbps, DiGi, U Mobile, and Unifi’s users’ average 4G Download Speeds were widely scattered between 6 Mbps to 15 Mbps.

It was a close-run race between Maxis and Celcom for first place in our Upload Speed Experience category. Maxis grabbed the award from Celcom, as our users on its network experienced an average upload speed of 6.6 Mbps — just 0.2 Mbps faster than that of Celcom’s. The biggest head-turner in our upload metrics was U Mobile as its users’ overall Upload Speed has almost doubled in the past six months to 5.1 Mbps. Malaysia’s other two major operators had scores of 4 Mbps or less.

While download speeds get the most attention, upload speed is becoming more and more important, with the increasing use of social media, content sharing and video chat applications. Mobile users are moving away from mere content consumption to content creation, which gives operators with the most powerful upstream connections a distinct advantage. For the time being at least, Maxis holds this advantage.

Maxis may have a claim on the speed metrics, but Celcom has the edge with latency measurements. Both the operators competed toe-to-toe, but Celcom emerged as the winner with a Latency Experience score of 43.2 milliseconds, compared to Maxis’ score of 43.9 ms. The users on two leading networks clocked a much shorter ping time compared to their rival operators, while Unifi was the closest to follow with an average ping time of 46.9 ms experienced by users. The remaining two operators scored 50 ms or more.

Latency is a measure of a network's response time, and it affects the mobile data experience in many subtle ways. The lower latency is on a network, the better the experience on a host of mobile applications and services, from web browsing to Voice-over-IP to real-time multiplayer gaming.