Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) has outpaced rival Globe Telecom Inc. in terms of providing mobile internet services in the country, according to umlaut, the global internet benchmarking company formerly known as P3.
The Germany-based company said Smart had the best and widest 4G/LTE coverage, and fastest upload and download speeds. It said Smart posted an overall score of 753 out of a maximum of 1,000 points in the annual umlaut benchmarking survey.
The score includes Smart’s performance in terms of voice coverage, data coverage, 4G coverage, user download speed, user upload speed and data service availability.
These results follow similar findings by other international third-party internet rating firms, such as Ookla and Opensignal, which have also released their respective crowdsource-based studies on internet services in the country and found Smart’s wireless network to be superior than that of competition.
“Our improved service performance is the outcome of several years of sustained investments in our network,” said Mario Tamayo, senior vice president for network planning and engineering for PLDT and Smart.
“We have as a result been able to deliver progressively better quality services to our customers, enabling them to benefit from the growing range of data and digital services,” he added.
“Congratulations to PLDT wireless subsidiary Smart Communications for winning the umlaut Mobile Benchmark and being awarded Best-in-Test,” said umlaut chief executive Hakan Ekmen.
“Our umlaut Mobile Benchmark is the de-facto industry standard, fairly and transparently assessing the global digital infrastructure,” Ekmen added.
Conducted with more than 200 operators in over 120 countries worldwide, umlaut’s network benchmarks are widely accepted as the global de-facto industry standard. Its crowdsourcing technology allows umlaut to collect data about real-world customer experience in a passive way from integrated background diagnosis processes in more than 900 diverse Android apps.