Egypt

In our last report, we saw Orange break the dead-heat with WE to win our Video Experience award. But in the last six months, Orange’s score dipped by 2.1 points while WE’s score grew by 2.9 points (on a 100 point scale). As a consequence of this, WE not only established a lead of 1.9 points but also upgraded its rating from Good to Very Good with a score of 65.1 points.

That said, our users reported the largest improvement on Vodafone’s network — a boost of 5.4 points to score 61.5 points. Vodafone placed in the Good ratings along with Etisalat and Orange.

Opensignal’s Video Experience metric quantifies video streaming quality by measuring real-world video streams across a range of content delivery networks, using dedicated video streaming tests, to reflect the true experience of users over an operator’s mobile network. The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account. And according to this measure, a Very Good rating indicates generally fast loading times and only occasional stalling. As we descend to the Good rating, loading times get longer and users encounter more stops and stutters in the video stream.

Opensignal measured the mobile gaming experience in Egypt for the first time and we learned that playing multiplayer games in the country is challenging. Vodafone won our first-ever award with a score of 41.3 (out of 100). But the score means that most users found this level of experience unacceptable, observed delays in the gameplay experience and did not receive immediate feedback on their actions. The remaining Egyptian operators — Orange, WE and Etisalat — placed in the Very Poor category, while Orange and WE tied for second place with 37.9 points, Etisalat trailed close behind at 37.1.

On a scale of 0-100 Opensignal’s Games Experience quantifies the experience of real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. It represents the experience of popular genres of mobile games such as battle royale or MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles of which Fortnight, PUBG and Arena of Valor are examples. Several factors combine to determine the eventual score, including jitter, packet loss and UDP latency. A high score improves the feel of gameplay and means that a game’s artificial intelligence is less likely to smooth over issues with network communications that could otherwise interrupt play.

We saw a slight decline in our Voice App Experience scores on three out of four networks compared to our previous report of between 1 and 2.6 points. Vodafone kept hold of our Video Experience award with a score of 73.4 (on a 100-point scale) despite our users reporting a decline of 1.4 points. WE was the only operator to make impressive gains in this category, moving up from last place in our previous report with a score of 67.8 points to second place with 70.1 points — a gain of 2.3 points (3.4%). Orange and Elisatal were statistically tied for the last place with scores below 70 points.

All four operators’ scores mean many users in Egypt were dissatisfied and experienced call quality impairments. Distortion, clicking sounds, or silence were experienced during their calls, which was perceptible and may have been annoying.

Our measure of Voice App Experience 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.

Our users in Egypt continue to experience decent increases in Download Speed Experience on all networks, except Orange. Since the last report, our users on Orange’s networks, on average, saw their speeds decline by 1.7%, while their WE counterparts reported an increase of 12.8%. As a result of which Orange and WE were statistically tied for the first place with speeds averaging just above 13 Mbps. Etisalat users also saw their download speeds increase by 10.7% to 12.5 Mbps. However, the largest improvement of 18.3% was reported by our Vodafone users, which boosted their average download speeds to 10.7 Mbps.

When we look at Download Speed Experience by technology, the 4G Download Speeds of our users on Etisalat and WE were over the 15 Mbps mark with scores of 17 Mbps and 17.4 Mbps, respectively. Meanwhile, Orange and WE were statistically tied for the highest 3G Download Speed with scores above 5.5 Mbps, while Vodafone and Etisalat trailed closely with scores just above 5 Mbps.

We saw a close-run race for our Upload Speed Experience award. Etisalat and Orange were tied in this category, with users observing average upload speeds of 5.5 Mbps. While WE's Upload Speed Experience score of 5.1 Mbps came within a hair's breadth of forcing a three-way tie, Vodafone was less than a megabit shy of the 5 Mbps mark.

While download speeds get the most attention, upload speed is becoming increasingly important as consumer mobile habits shift away from mere content consumption to its creation and content sharing on popular social media platforms, which gives operators with the most powerful upload speeds a distinct advantage.

Egypt's level of 4G access continues to grow, slowly but steadily. Vodafone held on to our national 4G Availability award as our 4G users on its network connected to 4G services 79.6% of the time. Orange was second-placed with a score of 77.5%, while Etisalat and WE’s scores were below the 75% mark.

In the last report, we had recorded impressive improvements across the board, but six months since then the growth in 4G Availability has diminished. The largest improvement of 2.5 percentage points was seen by our users on Etisalat’s network, followed by an increase of 1.3 percentage points observed by their counterparts on Vodafone’s and WE’s networks. Our Orange users saw the smallest growth of 0.8 percentage points.

Vodafone also won our 4G Coverage Experience award, with a score of 8.7 points (on a scale of 0-10). Etisalat finished second with 7.7 points, while Orange and WE were further away with 6.4 and 4.2 points respectively. Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how our 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 across all network operators.