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Voice App Experience and Games Experience had been Etisalat’s Achilles’ heel in its mobile experience for a while. In fact, Etisalat won all other awards that were up for grabs since we started reporting on mobile experience in the United Arab Emirates back in May 2019. However, since our last report Etisalat has made impressive leaps forward in both Games Experience and Voice App Experience, allowing the operator to secure both remaining awards and thus complete a full sweep of our awards table.
While the awards table this time appears unkind to du, there is more happening underneath the surface for the operator. In fact, our users on du’s network have seen the largest improvements across several metrics, including Video Experience, Download Speed Experience and 4G Availability, showing that du is reducing its gap with Etisalat across several of our measures of users’ mobile experience.
In the past six months, Etisalat’s Games Experience score has more than doubled compared to our previous report, and reached the score of 65.3 points in our one hundred point scale. Etisalat now has an 11.3 points lead on du — which also saw a significant improvement of 15.8 points. Our Etisalat users also observed an impressive 92.3% improvement in Voice App Experience, with Etisalat now scoring 78.3 points out of 100 — 7.4 points ahead of du.
In this report we have observed once again both Etisalat and du pass the 90% mark in 4G Availability, after observing the two operators passing this milestone for the first time back in our April 2020 report. In fact, in our last report du’s score dipped, bringing it just below the 90% mark at 89.7%. But this time, du’s 4G Availability improved by 1.7 percentage points, to reach 91.4% — just 1.9 percentage points behind Etisalat.
In our latest look at the UAE mobile market, Etisalat carried out the impressive feat of winning all our seven mobile experience awards. This was possible because Etisalat recorded huge improvements in both our Games Experience and Voice App Experience metrics — the two measures where we observed the operator lag behind du in the past. Such improvements also earned Etisalat recognition as Global Rising Star for Voice App Experience in our Global Mobile Network Experience Awards 2021 report. However, that does not mean that du is standing idle. In fact, our du users observed significant improvements across most measures of mobile experience, and the difference in the two operators’ scores is less than five percent in three metrics — Video Experience, 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience — which means we might very likely see du win back some awards in the near future.
Both operators are busy continuing their 5G networks rollout and the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) revealed it expects all inhabited areas of the country to be covered by 5G networks by the end of 2025.
In this report, we’ve analyzed the mobile network experience provided by the UAE’s two national operators — du and Etisalat — at the national level in the 90 days starting January 1, 2021 and ending on March 31, 2021. We have used 5G measurements in addition to those from previous generations of mobile network technology when determining the overall scores for each metric.
| Mobile Experience Awards United Arab Emirates | ||
|---|---|---|
April 2021,
United Arab Emirates Report
|
E
Etisalat
|
d
du
|
Video Experience
| ||
Games Experience
| ||
Voice App Experience
| ||
Download Speed Experience
| ||
Upload Speed Experience
| ||
4G Availability
| ||
4G Coverage Experience
| ||
|
Mobile Experience Awards Winners
|
April 2021,
United Arab Emirates
|
|---|---|
|
Video Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
Games Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
Voice App Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
Download Speed Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
Upload Speed Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
4G Availability
|
E
Etisalat
|
|
4G Coverage Experience
|
E
Etisalat
|
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.
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