Smart Communications Inc. overtook rival telecommunication companies in terms of network ‘consistent quality’ in the Philippines, according to Canadian crowd-sourced mobile data company Tutela.
In a report entitled “Southeast Asia State of Mobile Networks February 2019,” Tutela said Smart scored 91 percent in terms of ‘basic’ consistent quality, slightly ahead of the competition’s 89.3 percent.
This means that 91 percent of the time, Smart users were able to gain access to a ‘basic’ connection, which supports simple web browsing, emails and simple applications like Facebook and WhatsApp.
The big difference was in the “excellent” category.
According to the report, Smart had a consistent quality score of 48.8 percent in the ‘excellent’ category, more than double that of the competition’s 23.8 percent.
This means Smart users in the country were twice as likely to experience the ‘excellent’ standard, which is needed for the more demanding mobile use cases, like HD video calling or 1080p video streaming.
Smart in this category ranked sixth out of the total 15 operators included in the study, which covered Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand 85 billion mobile network measurements collected between Dec. 1, 2018 and Jan. 9, 2019.
“Smart has a small lead over Globe (Telecom Inc.) when it comes to basic quality, but excellent quality is where it really differentiates its network,” Tutela said in the report.
“Our continuing network upgrades across the country are aimed to address our customers’ ever-growing need for high quality mobile internet services,” said Mario G. Tamayo, PLDT-Smart senior vice president for network planning and engineering.
“Today, our customers are increasingly using high-bandwidth services such as video streaming aside from social media, online shopping and mobile banking,” he added.
Filipinos, according to recent studies, spend the most number of hours online per day at a little over 10 hours, well above the worldwide average of 6 hours, 42 minutes. Moreover, Filipinos are viewing more video online, even more than video on broadcast.