Introduction
While Smart continues to enjoy impressive leads in Video Experience, Download Speed Experience and Upload Speed Experience, together with a more modest one in 4G Availability and has won our inaugural 4G Coverage Experience award in the Philippines,
Globe has made some substantial gains since our last report. The operator forced a tie on Games Experience and took the Voice App Experience award from Smart outright.
We’ve recently shown that Video Experience and Latency Experience, together with 4G Availability and Download Speed Experience have been improving over the long-term — as highlighted by Opensignal recognising Globe and Smart as Global Rising Stars for Video Experience and 4G Availability respectively, in our Global Mobile Network Experience Awards 2020 report.
This infers that the declines our users have observed in this report across our three experiential metrics — Video Experience, Games Experience and Voice App Experience — are a short-term phenomenon which will likely disappear once life returns to normal in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, it’s worth noting that both Globe and Smart have managed to increase the percentage of time our users spent connected to 4G services since our last report — an impressive feat given the difficult circumstances.
Looking to the future, it’s clear that both operators have ambitious 5G rollout plans and as adoption of new generation of mobile technology increases, so will the speeds and scores seen by our users. For example, Smart has announced that it is rolling out its commercial 5G service to key cities in the Visayas and Mindanao, while Globe has recently rolled out 5G coverage in strategic locations in a number of cities. Also, while historically Smart has won the lion’s share of our awards, it’s clear that Globe has no intention of settling for second place, given that it recently announced a large network upgrade program that it claims will be its largest ever.
In this report, we've analyzed the mobile network experience of the Philippines' two national operators in the 90 days starting July 1, 2020, both at a national level and across all 17 regions, to see how Globe and Smart measure up.