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In our previous report, STC and Mobily joined Zain in providing 4G Availability of 80% or more. This time, all three have hit the 85% mark or beyond, while STC has overtaken Zain for this measure of the mobile experience. STC’s 4G users were on 4G connections for 86.4% of the time, up an impressive 5.5 points and within striking distance of the 90% mark for our next report if it keeps up this rate of progress. Mobily’s users also saw good progress — its 4G Availability rose by 5 points to 85%, just 0.5 percentage points shy of that seen by Zain’s users.
STC experienced a great burst speed since our last report in October, with its users seeing increases of 7.2 Mbps (38.8%) and 2.4 Mbps (27.8%) in Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience, respectively. This enabled STC to claim the Download Speed Experience award outright after having previously tied with Mobily for it — and lead by a comfortable margin of 5.2 Mbps. In contrast, Mobily and Zain’s users observed more modest improvements in these measures of the mobile experience, with Download Speed Experience increasing by between 2 and 2.1 Mbps and Upload Speed Experience rising by 1 Mbps for both operators.
All of the kingdom’s nationwide operators have made good progress in terms of Video Experience since our last report, with their users reporting increases of more than seven points. Previously all three operators placed in the Good category (55-65) for this measure of the mobile experience, but this time, both STC and Mobily have moved into the Very Good (65-75) category. This means that their users experienced generally fast loading times and only occasional stalling but the experience may have been somewhat inconsistent.
Both STC and Mobily have added to their awards tally since our last report, with STC increasing its haul from three to five by taking the 4G Availability award from Zain and winning our new 4G Coverage Experience Award. STC also won the Download Speed Experience award outright after tying with Mobily for it in our last report. Mobily also increased its award tally by two to three, stripping STC of the Voice App Experience award and claiming our new Games Experience award.
Our first look at our new Games Experience metric at the operator level in Saudi Arabia, reveals that all three operators have much work still to do before they can provide their mobile gamers with an experience free of connectivity issues. Both STC and Zain fall into Very Poor for this measure of the mobile experience, while the winner, Mobily, is just ahead with a score of 42.5, which places it in the Poor category.
Since our last report in October 2019, Saudi Arabia’s operators have made healthy progress with their users observing improvements in their mobile experience across the vast majority of our metrics. STC was the exception to this rule, but only for Voice App Experience and Latency Experience. The operator has made great strides in both Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience, with its users seeing increases of 7.2 Mbps (38.8%) and 2.4 Mbps (27.8%), respectively, allowing it to claim the Download Speed Experience award outright after having previously tied with Mobily for it.
All three operators’ 4G users spent 85% or more of their time on 4G connections — a significant improvement from the results seen in our last report, but still shy of the 90% plus figures we see in some markets.
Our awards table has undergone a considerable amount of reshuffling since our last report. In addition to becoming the new holder for the Download Speed Experience Award, STC also picked up our new 4G Coverage Experience award and snatched the 4G Availability award from the previous holder, Zain. However, not everything went STC’s way — Mobily pushed past it to claim the Voice App Experience award, and also picked up our new Games Experience award.
While STC was the only operator whose users reported an increase in Latency Experience (of 6ms), this measure of the mobile experience is still a weak spot across all three of the kingdom’s operators — given that our users observed latencies greater than 55ms (a startlingly high 82.6ms in the case of STC). Unsurprisingly, this had a knock-on effect on latency-sensitive applications and is reflected to some extent in the kingdom’s operators’ placing in either the Very Poor (STC and Zain) or Poor (Mobily) categories for our new one-of-a-kind Games Experience metric.
Opensignal’s Games Experience metric is a measure of how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-100, it analyzes how the multiplayer mobile Games Experience is affected by mobile network conditions including latency, packet loss and jitter to determine the impact on gameplay and the overall multiplayer Games Experience.
Looking to the future, the stage appears to be set for significant improvements in both Games Experience and many of our other measures of the mobile experience. Both STC and Zain have already launched 5G mobile services, while Mobily is currently providing a 5G fixed wireless access service and is likely to follow its peers soon given the deals that it has recently signed with Ericsson and Nokia. 5G smartphones and their supporting networks can offer significantly faster download and upload speeds than their 4G counterparts – through allowing the use of higher frequency bands and more sophisticated techniques — as well as lower latencies.
In this report, we’ve analyzed the mobile network experience provided by Saudi Arabia’s three national operators — STC, Mobily and Zain — at the national level in the 90 days starting January, 1, 2020.
| Mobile Experience Awards Saudi Arabia | |||
|---|---|---|---|
April 2020,
Saudi Arabia Report
|
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
Video Experience
| |||
Games Experience
| |||
Voice App Experience
| |||
Download Speed Experience
| |||
Upload Speed Experience
| |||
Latency Experience
| |||
4G Availability
| |||
4G Coverage Experience
| |||
|
Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
April 2020,
Saudi Arabia
|
|---|---|
|
Video Experience
|
S
STC
|
|
Games Experience
|
M
Mobily
|
|
Voice App Experience
|
M
Mobily
|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
S
STC
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
S
STC
|
|
Latency Experience
|
M
Mobily
|
|
4G Availability
|
S
STC
|
|
4G Coverage Experience
|
S
STC
|
|
Video Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | |||
|
4G Video Experience
| 74.2 (± 0.26) | 73.3 (± 0.35) | 67.0 (± 0.55) |
|
3G Video Experience
| 47.7 (± 1.13) | 48.7 (± 1.39) | 43.6 (± 1.76) |
| 4G Video Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
74 (± 0.26) |
|
M
Mobily
|
73 (± 0.35) |
|
Z
Zain
|
67 (± 0.55) |
| 3G Video Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
48 (± 1.13) |
|
M
Mobily
|
49 (± 1.39) |
|
Z
Zain
|
44 (± 1.76) |
|
Games Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | |||
|
4G Games Experience
| 43.0 (± 0.36) | 51.6 (± 0.58) | 38.9 (± 0.12) |
|
3G Games Experience
| 34.3 (± 0.21) | 35.9 (± 0.26) | 33.0 (± 0.39) |
| 4G Games Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
43 (± 0.36) |
|
M
Mobily
|
52 (± 0.58) |
|
Z
Zain
|
39 (± 0.12) |
| 3G Games Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
34 (± 0.21) |
|
M
Mobily
|
36 (± 0.26) |
|
Z
Zain
|
33 (± 0.39) |
|
Voice App Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in 0-100 points | |||
|
4G Voice App Experience
| 76.4 (± 0.16) | 77.4 (± 0.26) | 71.6 (± 0.34) |
|
3G Voice App Experience
| 64.8 (± 0.47) | 66.4 (± 0.63) | 60.0 (± 0.98) |
| 4G Voice App Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
76 (± 0.16) |
|
M
Mobily
|
77 (± 0.26) |
|
Z
Zain
|
72 (± 0.34) |
| 3G Voice App Experience | in 0-100 points |
|
S
STC
|
65 (± 0.47) |
|
M
Mobily
|
66 (± 0.63) |
|
Z
Zain
|
60 (± 0.98) |
|
Download Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | |||
|
4G Download Speed
| 30.8 (± 0.25) | 25.5 (± 0.26) | 14.2 (± 0.20) |
|
3G Download Speed
| 5.2 (± 0.10) | 4.7 (± 0.10) | 4.0 (± 0.12) |
| 4G Download Speed | in Mbps |
|
S
STC
|
31 (± 0.25) |
|
M
Mobily
|
25 (± 0.26) |
|
Z
Zain
|
14 (± 0.20) |
| 3G Download Speed | in Mbps |
|
S
STC
|
5 (± 0.10) |
|
M
Mobily
|
5 (± 0.10) |
|
Z
Zain
|
4 (± 0.12) |
|
Upload Speed Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in Mbps | |||
|
4G Upload Speed
| 13.3 (± 0.10) | 8.5 (± 0.11) | 7.4 (± 0.11) |
|
3G Upload Speed
| 1.1 (± 0.03) | 1.1 (± 0.03) | 1.0 (± 0.04) |
| 4G Upload Speed | in Mbps |
|
S
STC
|
13 (± 0.10) |
|
M
Mobily
|
9 (± 0.11) |
|
Z
Zain
|
7 (± 0.11) |
| 3G Upload Speed | in Mbps |
|
S
STC
|
1 (± 0.03) |
|
M
Mobily
|
1 (± 0.03) |
|
Z
Zain
|
1 (± 0.04) |
|
Latency Experience
Additional Metrics |
S
STC
|
M
Mobily
|
Z
Zain
|
|---|---|---|---|
| in ms | |||
|
4G Latency
| 74.6 (± 0.34) | 49.8 (± 0.30) | 56.0 (± 0.53) |
|
3G Latency
| 113.5 (± 1.41) | 82.4 (± 1.49) | 88.4 (± 2.51) |
| 4G Latency | in ms |
|
S
STC
|
75 (± 0.34) |
|
M
Mobily
|
50 (± 0.30) |
|
Z
Zain
|
56 (± 0.53) |
| 3G Latency | in ms |
|
S
STC
|
113 (± 1.41) |
|
M
Mobily
|
82 (± 1.49) |
|
Z
Zain
|
88 (± 2.51) |
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.
Opensignal is the mobile analytics company committed to improving mobile connectivity across the globe. We are the independent authority for understanding the true experience consumers receive on wireless networks.
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