Egypt

In Video Experience, our users on Orange saw their score improve by 10.1 points (on a scale of 0-100), not only putting the operator in a Very Good category (65-75) but also breaking the deadlock with WE, as Orange pulled ahead to win the award in this category following two consecutive draws in our previous reports. Our users on all four networks saw impressive improvements in their Video Experience: WE improved its score by 8.2 points, the third-placed Etisalat managed the most impressive leap of 11.9 points to move into the Good Video Experience bracket (55-65). Vodafone also upgraded its rating to Good but ended up in the last place with an improvement of 5.7 points.

When we split the measurements by network technology type, operators’ 4G-only Video Experience ranks reflected the national ranking but with superior ratings — Orange achieved an Excellent rating, followed by WE, Etisalat and Vodafone with Very Good ratings. However, in 3G-only Video Experience Vodafone took a lead over Etisalat for third place.

Opensignal’s unique Video Experience measures users’ real-world video streams and uses an ITU-based approach to determine perceived video quality. The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account. And according to this measure, an Excellent rating indicates fast load times and practically non-existent stalling at all resolutions. As we descend down the ratings — Very Good and Good —, loading times get longer and users encounter more stops and stutters in the video stream.

In this report, we took a first look at the Voice App Experience in Egypt, at an operator level. This unique, first-of-its-kind metric quantifies the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile networks, and 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.

Vodafone became Egypt's first operator to win our Voice Experience award and the only operator to achieve an Acceptable rating (74-80) with a score of 74.8 points. While Orange was separated by 4.1 points at 70.7, Etisalat and WE were further behind at 69.4 and 67.8 respectively, putting all three of them in the Poor rating bracket (66-74). An Acceptable rating means users are satisfied and generally able to comprehend without repetition. Likewise a Poor rating means our users' Voice App Experience will be marred by frequent distortion, clicking sounds or silence experienced during the call.

Our users in Egypt have observed some decent increases in Download Speed Experience since the last report on a majority of operators’ networks. Orange remains the national leader in this category, with a jump of 15.3% in its score over the past six months to reach 13.7 Mbps. But this was not the largest increase: WE’s score (11.9 Mbps) leapt by more than 22%, with the operator thus taking the second place from Etisalat, whose score of 11.3 Mbps had increased by 11%.

Orange remains well ahead of its rivals in 4G Download Speed Experience as the operator's score has continued to stay above 20 Mbps. While Vodafone continues to be at the back of the pack, Etisalat and WE come toe-to-toe at 17 Mbps and 16.6 Mbps respectively.

Although we thought the increases in download speed since our last report were most impressive, they were dwarfed by some of the jumps in Upload Speed Experience. Winner Orange kept hold of our Upload Speed Experience award, as our users observed a jump of nearly 30% to pass the 5 Mbps milestone. Our users on second- and third-placed Etisalat and WE, both saw larger increases of around 38.9% and 63.7% respectively. Vodafone saw the smallest increase (still respectable, around 27%) — but the operator is still below the 4 Mbps mark.

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 Orange holds a clear advantage.

Vodafone kept hold of our Latency Experience award, with a score that was just over 7 milliseconds faster than its closest rival Orange. However, users didn't see any significant improvements in this category since the last report. In fact, users saw higher latencies on Etisalat and WE’s networks over this period — 13.1% and 15.3% increase in network response time on average.

Latency is a measure of network responsiveness, and it affects the mobile internet 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.

Egypt’s 4G Availability keeps getting better. Vodafone broke the dead heat with Orange and reclaimed the award in this category with an increase of 9.4 percentage points compared to Orange’s increase of 8.8 percentage points. Both the operators surpassed the 75% mark, with our users, on average, being able to connect to 4G services more than 78% and 76% of the time on Vodafone’s and Orange’s networks respectively. Etisalat and WE also shone in this category with users on their networks experiencing even greater improvements — 10.2 and 15.1 percentage points respectively — as both operators surpassed the 70% mark. This signifies that operators in Egypt are focused on strengthening their 4G networks, and if this trend continues we might see one or more operators surpass 80% 4G Availability in the next report.

Vodafone won our inaugural 4G Coverage Experience award, with a score of 8.3 (on a scale of 0-10), while Etisalat closely trailed behind at 7.2. Both were considerably ahead of their competitors Orange and WE, with scores just below 6 and 4 points respectively.

Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how Opensignal’s mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-10, it analyzes the locations where customers of a network operator received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by Opensignal users of all network operators.