Dialog makes a strong debut; wins four out of seven Opensignal awards outright
In Opensignal’s first national report on Sri Lanka’s mobile network experience one operator dominated our award table. Dialog won four of our seven awards outright, and by very large margins in all of the categories — 4G Availability, 4G Coverage, Latency and Upload Speed Experience. Mobitel was the closest to Dialog. The operator won two categories outright — Video and Voice App Experience, tied with Dialog in Download Speed Experience and came in strong second in several of our metrics. However, Hutch and Airtel clearly have some catching up to do, especially with the latter being a 3G-only operator.
Dialog has established a big lead in 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience
Dialog swept away our 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience awards with a big lead. In 4G Availability, the operator surpassed the 75% mark with a winning score of 76.2%. The second-place finisher Mobitel was 5.6 percentage points behind the leader in our analysis, while Hutch scored below 60%. Dialog has clearly deployed a much more accessible 4G service, according to our measurements, as our users on average were able to connect to a 4G service 76.2% of the time on Dialog’s network. We saw similar results in 4G Coverage Experience, Dialog lead the pack with a score of 7.7 (on a 10-point scale), followed by Mobitel at 5.7 points, while Hutch was far apart at 2.2 points.
Video Experience ranges from Poor to Good in Sri Lanka
Depending on the operator, the Video Experience in Sri Lanka can vary from Poor (under 40 points out of 100), in which case streamed video is very slow to load and experiences frequent interruptions even at lower resolutions, to Good (55-65), where video loads much more quickly and stalls less often. Mobitel was the only operator to garner a Good rating with a winning score of 58.9 points, while Dialog missed the same by less than a point and joined Airtel in the Fair ratings (40-55) bracket. Hutch came last with a Poor rating.
Mobitel, Sri Lanka’s only operator with Acceptable Voice App Experience
Mobitel leads our unique measure of Voice App Experience that quantifies the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger. Mobitel won our award in this category with a score of 77.1 points, and became the only operator in Sri Lanka to earn an Acceptable rating (74-80) on a 100-point scale. The remaining operators ended up in the Poor rating (66-74) bracket. An Acceptable rating means that users are generally satisfied, with some suffering from perceptible call quality impairments, while a Poor rating means many users are dissatisfied and suffer call quality impairments like distortion, clicking sounds or silence.
Download Speed Experience: Mobitel and Dialog end up in a dead heat
Mobitel and Dialog statistically tied for the first place in our Download Speed Experience category with average speeds of 11.1 Mbps and 10.6 Mbps respectively. While we often see a range of speeds across a country's different operators, in Sri Lanka the differences between fastest and slowest average connection speed that users experience are quite significant. Users on the leading operators in this category saw average download speeds two to three times faster than other operators.
Huge variations in Upload Speed Experience exist among Sri Lanka's operators
Dialog dominated our Upload Speed Experience category with its users seeing an average connection speed of 4.7 Mbps. We saw a wide range of speeds in this category as Dialog’s award-winning score was almost 40% faster than Mobitel, more than three times faster than Hutch, and almost eight times faster than 3G-only operator Airtel. With an increase in the use of social media applications, Upload Speed Experience is increasingly becoming an important aspect of users’ mobile network experience and at present Dialog holds a clear advantage in this regard.