Introduction
Since our last report, Telenor has made great progress — the average overall download speeds observed by our users on its network rose by a remarkable 4.8 Mbps, allowing it to move from last place to first place for Download Speed Experience. In addition, across many of our metrics our Telenor users’ mobile network experience proved to be more resilient than their counterparts on other networks. As a consequence, Telenor won the Games Experience award outright after statistically tying for it in our previous report with Ooredoo and Mytel. Telenor also took three awards from Mytel: Voice App Experience, Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience. Finally, Telenor also managed to tie with Mytel on Video Experience. As a result, Mytel’s haul of awards has dropped from six awards to two — 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience.
Speaking of 4G Availability, our users spent more than 90% of their time connected to 4G services while using Mytel and Ooredoo’s networks and both Telenor and MPT are less than one percentage point away from breaching the 90% mark.
While there has been some progress since our last report, in many cases operators’ scores have declined. This has pushed Ooredoo down a category for Video Experience — from Very Good to Good, which puts it in line with MPT but behind Telenor and Mytel and it means that our users across all four operators observed an Acceptable Voice App Experience and a Poor Games Experience. The former means that our users were generally able to comprehend without repetition, though some may have experienced perceptible call quality impairments such as clicking sounds of short duration or distortion. A Poor Games Experience means that most users found this level of experience unacceptable and many users felt a lack of controllability in the Games Experience.
One factor that has contributed to the drop in scores is the COVID-19 pandemic,as the number of locally-transmitted cases in the country has been increasing rapidly since mid-August. We have seen COVID-19 related changes in our users’ mobile network experience in other countries that occur due to a combination of differences in data consumption and our users’ locations. Speaking of the latter, the pandemic prompted a stay-at-home order in Yangon, the country’s largest city, which came into effect on Sep. 21, 2020
In this report, we have examined the mobile network experience of the four main mobile network operators in Myanmar: MPT, Mytel, Ooredoo and Telenor, over a period of 90 days beginning July 1, 2020 to see how they fared.