Introduction
In our first look at Bangladesh’s mobile network market, Opensignal found an operator landscape characterized by fierce competition and opportunities. In almost all the categories we found at least three out of four operators challenging each other to offer the best network experience. And this, in turn, can be attributed directly or indirectly to Bangladesh’s young and evolving mobile ecosystem. The country launched its first 3G services in2013, and its first 4G services in2018. When you couple this with the country's current mobile internet penetration of approximately 52%, it reveals the ample opportunities that are available to the existing market players.
Despite 4G technology being in its early phases, it has been rapidly rolled out in the country, as our Bangladeshi users saw their 4G Availability ranging between 65% and nearly 80%, depending on the choice of operators. At the same time, on our other measurements, the operators have a lot of opportunity to enhance the user experience on their networks and to enable the country to catch up with its regional peers, as seen in our global reports.
In this report, we examined the mobile network experience of the four main mobile operators — Airtel, Banglalink, Grameenphone and Robi (we are treating Airtel and Robi as individual operators, as they are operating as separate consumer brands) for a period of 90 days beginning October 1, 2019, to see how they fared on our real-world measurements.