Introduction
Since ending its mobile duopoly in 2013 Myanmar has transformed into a booming wireless market. As of the third quarter of 2019 the country had a 124% mobile connection penetration rate and more than 67 million connections.
Three of the four national operators in Myanmar have achieved 4G Availability nearing 90% and our Mytel 4G users spent an astonishing 96.1% of their time on 4G connections. The operator, which first launched services in Myanmar in June 2018, has also tested 5G services and hopes to be awarded 5G spectrum licenses so it can commercially launch 5G this year.
Mytel has become a dominant player in the country, winning six of Opensignal’s seven awards. The operator won its first Voice App Experience award, which assesses the perceived quality of voice communication apps such as WhatsApp, Skype or Facebook Messenger. Mytel scored 80.7 putting it in the Good category (80-87 on a 0-100 scale) in terms of user experience. Telenor was slightly behind Mytel with a score of 80.1 and also in the Good category. Ooredoo and MPT with scores of 79.3 and 75.7 respectively, fell into the Acceptable category (74-80 on a 0-100 scale).
Mytel also won our new 4G Coverage Experience award, which measures the mobile coverage experience in all the locations that matter to users — where they live, work and play. Mytel scored a 3.8 on our scale of 0-10 followed by Telenor with a score of 3.2.
In Games Experience, which is also a new Opensignal measurement, Telenor, Mytel and Ooredoo statistically tied in the overall award category. But if we look solely at the gaming experience over the 4G network, Telenor is leading with a score of 71.8, followed by Ooredoo with a score of 68.8, which puts both of them firmly into the Fair category. This measurement looks at how the user multiplayer gaming experience is impacted by network conditions such as latency, packet loss and jitter.
In 4G Download Speeds, Mytel and MPT statistically tied for the top spot with MPT reporting download speeds of 21.0 Mbps up from 19.6 Mbps in our last report and Mytel reporting speeds of 20.8 Mbps up from 18.0. But Ooredoo and Telenor saw their 4G Download Speeds drop. Ooredoo saw the most dramatic decline from 25.9 Mbps in October to 20.1 Mbps and Telenor saw a decline from 18.0 Mbps in October to 16.5 Mbps.
In 4G Upload Speeds we saw a similar dynamic as we did with 4G Download Speeds but from different operators. Telenor saw its users’ 4G Upload Speeds increase from 7.2 Mbps in October to 9.7 Mbps in the current report. Mytel users also saw an upswing in 4G Upload Speeds from 5.9 Mbps in October to 8.5 Mbps. However, Ooredoo and MPT’s users saw the opposite. Ooredoo’s 4G Upload Speeds declined from 10.9 Mbps in October to 9.8 Mbps in this report. And MPT saw a decline from 9.8 Mbps in October to 9.2 Mbps today.