Introduction
A great deal has changed across the world since our first report and Sri Lanka’s mobile network experience appears to be no exception. While there has been considerable progress in some areas — with Mobitel and Airtel’s impressive gains in 4G Availability and Video Experience, respectively, being the most obvious examples — there were quite a few declines across many of our metrics, with Dialog and Mobitel users seeing the biggest impacts. The fall in scores is likely due to the changes in mobile network usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the generous data packages offered by the operators to support their customers during a period in which connectivity has become even more crucial to society, given the need for increased remote working.
Looking at Download Speed Experience, Mobitel’s victory appears to be due to its greater resilience in this regard as the average download speeds observed by our Mobitel users declined by 2 Mbps instead of the 2.7 Mbps seen by their Dialog counterparts. However, Mobitel and Dialog’s Download Speed Experience scores remained above 7.8 Mbps and there was still a considerable gap — albeit a reduced one— between their scores and those of Airtel and Hutch.
Back in February, Mobitel was the only operator in Sri Lanka to have a Good rating for Video Experience and an acceptable rating for Voice App Experience. This time round, it has joined its peers with Fair and Poor ratings, respectively.
In this report we examined the mobile network experience of users across the country on four national operator networks — Mobitel, Dialog, Airtel and Hutch — to see how they fared on real-world measurements over a period of 90 days starting on April 1, 2020