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SmarTone became Hong Kong’s first operator to win Opensignal’s new and unique Voice App Experience award. We saw fierce competition between all four operators but SmarTone was the only operator to achieve a Good rating (80-87), while the remaining three landed in the Fair ranking bracket (74-80), missing the higher rating by a hair. Voice App Experience quantifies the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile networks.
It was a four-way split in our 4G Availability category, as all four operators in Hong Kong came neck and neck with scores above the 90% mark. This means that our users on each of the four networks in Hong Kong, on average, connected to 4G services more than 90% of the time. Such high scores reflect the omnipresence of LTE in the city, which will aid a smoother transition to 5G as the operators plan the roll-out of the next generation of mobile technology.
3 and csl retained a Very Good rating (65-75 on a 100-point scale) in Video Experience; the operators challenged each other to win this category but ended up in a dead heat for a second time. CMHK also showed improvements but was less than a point shy of achieving the same rating. A Very Good rating indicates that our users enjoyed short load times and little stalling during playback, even at higher resolutions.
csl remained the undisputed winner in both our Download and Upload Speed Experience categories. csl’s leading Download Speed Experience of 22.9 Mbps was approximately 15% faster than 3’s, 38% faster than CMHK’s, and 55% faster than SmarTone’s — who scored 19.8 Mbps, 16.6 Mbps, and 14.8 Mbps respectively. Meanwhile, in the Upload Speed Experience category, csl’s winning score of 8.6 Mbps was at least 1.3 Mbps ahead of its competitors.
csl and CMHK ended in a draw for our Latency Experience award, as the former improved its score by one point to challenge CMHK. But it was on 3’s network that our users saw the greatest improvement — of 5 milliseconds (ms) — from our previous report Network responsiveness in Hong Kong is commendable as our users on all four networks now experience latencies well below 40ms. The lower the latency is on a network, the better the user experience is for a host of mobile applications and services, from web browsing and Voice-over-IP to real-time multiplayer gaming.
Hong Kong is a small but well-developed mobile market that is among the world's elite territories in terms of Mobile Network Experience. While the city is embarking on the path to 5G, Opensignal used real-world data to compare the performance of Hong Kong’s four operators in their existing 3G and 4G networks across our six key award metrics. We found that fierce competition continues to exist between them. In our 4G Availability metric, all four operators scored above 90%, meaning that our users in Hong Kong were able to latch on to a 4G signal more than nine out of ten times. The scores in this category did not increase much across the board, a sign that operators’ networks have reached maturity.
Our users in Hong Kong enjoy impressively fast Upload speeds, but there is quite a lot of room for improvement in Download Speed Experience: csl remained the only operator with average download speeds greater than 20 Mbps, which is substantially slower than the speeds offered by operators in other Asian countries. But in terms of network responsiveness, all four operators scored below 40 milliseconds, indicating that Hong Kong excels in our Latency Experience metric.
In our Voice App Experience, a brand new measure of users’ experience of over-the-top (OTT) voice calls, only one operator — SmarTone — garnered a Good rating to win our Voice App Experience award. In our Video Experience measurements, on the other hand, all the operators rated Good or above.
| Mobile Experience Awards Hong Kong | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
November 2019,
Hong Kong Report
|
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
4G Availability
| ||||
Video Experience
| ||||
Voice App Experience
| ||||
Download Speed Experience
| ||||
Upload Speed Experience
| ||||
Latency Experience
| ||||
|
Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
November 2019,
Hong Kong
|
|---|---|
|
Voice App Experience
|
S
SmarTone
|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
c
csl
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
c
csl
|
|
Mobile Experience Awards Draws
|
November 2019, Hong Kong
|
|---|---|
|
4G Availability
|
c
csl
3
3
S
SmarTone
C
CMHK
|
|
Video Experience
|
c
csl
3
3
|
|
Latency Experience
|
c
csl
C
CMHK
|
|
Video Experience
Additional Metrics |
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | ||||
|
4G Video Experience
| 70.4 (± 1.34) | 69.7 (± 1.44) | 59.8 (± 2.17) | 66.6 (± 1.40) |
|
3G Video Experience
| 54.6 (± 5.34) | — | 36.2 (± 5.73) | 40.5 (± 4.75) |
| 4G Video Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
c
csl
|
70 (± 1.34) |
|
3
3
|
70 (± 1.44) |
|
S
SmarTone
|
60 (± 2.17) |
|
C
CMHK
|
67 (± 1.40) |
| 3G Video Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
c
csl
|
55 (± 5.34) |
|
3
3
|
— |
|
S
SmarTone
|
36 (± 5.73) |
|
C
CMHK
|
41 (± 4.75) |
|
Voice App Experience
Additional Metrics |
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | ||||
|
4G Voice App Experience
| 79.4 (± 0.92) | 79.1 (± 1.23) | 81.9 (± 0.74) | 79.7 (± 0.77) |
|
3G Voice App Experience
| 77.1 (± 3.17) | — | 77.3 (± 3.27) | 71.8 (± 4.01) |
| 4G Voice App Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
c
csl
|
79 (± 0.92) |
|
3
3
|
79 (± 1.23) |
|
S
SmarTone
|
82 (± 0.74) |
|
C
CMHK
|
80 (± 0.77) |
| 3G Voice App Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
c
csl
|
77 (± 3.17) |
|
3
3
|
— |
|
S
SmarTone
|
77 (± 3.27) |
|
C
CMHK
|
72 (± 4.01) |
|
Download Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | ||||
|
4G Download Speed
| 24.5 (± 0.91) | 20.9 (± 0.80) | 16.2 (± 0.91) | 17.8 (± 0.65) |
|
3G Download Speed
| 7.1 (± 0.73) | — | 2.9 (± 0.27) | 4.1 (± 0.40) |
| 4G Download Speed | in Mbps |
|
c
csl
|
24 (± 0.91) |
|
3
3
|
21 (± 0.80) |
|
S
SmarTone
|
16 (± 0.91) |
|
C
CMHK
|
18 (± 0.65) |
| 3G Download Speed | in Mbps |
|
c
csl
|
7 (± 0.73) |
|
3
3
|
— |
|
S
SmarTone
|
3 (± 0.27) |
|
C
CMHK
|
4 (± 0.40) |
|
Upload Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | ||||
|
4G Upload Speed
| 9.2 (± 0.38) | 7.5 (± 0.35) | 5.5 (± 0.24) | 8.0 (± 0.35) |
|
3G Upload Speed
| 1.9 (± 0.21) | — | 0.9 (± 0.10) | 1.0 (± 0.12) |
| 4G Upload Speed | in Mbps |
|
c
csl
|
9 (± 0.38) |
|
3
3
|
7 (± 0.35) |
|
S
SmarTone
|
5 (± 0.24) |
|
C
CMHK
|
8 (± 0.35) |
| 3G Upload Speed | in Mbps |
|
c
csl
|
2 (± 0.21) |
|
3
3
|
— |
|
S
SmarTone
|
1 (± 0.10) |
|
C
CMHK
|
1 (± 0.12) |
|
Latency Experience
Additional Metrics |
c
csl
|
3
3
|
S
SmarTone
|
C
CMHK
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| in ms | ||||
|
4G Latency
| 30.3 (± 0.37) | 35.3 (± 0.53) | 33.8 (± 0.34) | 28.5 (± 0.32) |
|
3G Latency
| 40.4 (± 2.44) | — | 58.2 (± 3.03) | 55.9 (± 4.20) |
| 4G Latency | in ms |
|
c
csl
|
30 (± 0.37) |
|
3
3
|
35 (± 0.53) |
|
S
SmarTone
|
34 (± 0.34) |
|
C
CMHK
|
29 (± 0.32) |
| 3G Latency | in ms |
|
c
csl
|
40 (± 2.44) |
|
3
3
|
— |
|
S
SmarTone
|
58 (± 3.03) |
|
C
CMHK
|
56 (± 4.20) |
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
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