Recent Opensignal findings gathered from across Mindanao, the National Capital Region (NCR), North & Central Luzon, South Luzon, and the Visayas, indicate significant improvements between Q4 2018 and Q3 2020 for mobile Video Experience, Download Speed Experience, Latency Experience and 4G Availability for Globe and Smart.
A significant improvement of 28.6% in overall Video Experience was experienced by users in North & Central Luzon, while users in all five regions saw their Video Experience scores increase by more than 19%.
Smart came out on top of Video Experience scores across all five regions in both Q4 2018 and Q3 2020.
Globe improved in North & Central Luzon and the NCR, where its score rose by 40.6% and 30.3%, respectively. Globe only saw a percentage improvement below 20% in the Visayas.
The highest Video Experience was in the NCR for both telcos in both quarters. In Q3 2020, Smart in the NCR was the only network observed to have a Very Good (65-75) Video Experience.
On average overall download speeds, all regions, except the Visayas, observed speeds increasing by more than 20% between Q4 2018 and Q3 2020. The Visayas only registered a 12.2% increase within the same period. NCR’s Download Speed Experience increased by 28.9% to 13.4 Mbps, more than doubling the speeds seen in Mindanao and the Visayas. Smart observed the fastest speeds across all five regions in Q3 2020.
In terms of 4G availability, the proportion of time users spent connected to 4G by Q3 2020 services was highest in NCR at above 90%.
The improvement in the country’s 4G performance in the Opensignal report complements the steady improvement in the country’s overall internet speed as indicated by Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index.
For September 2020, Ookla results showed a 229.70% improvement on the Philippines’ internet average download speed for fixed broadband and 127.01% for mobile broadband compared to its 2016 speed. The country’s average download speed for fixed broadband improved from 7.91Mbps (July 2016) to 26.08Mbps (September 2020), while average download speed for mobile broadband also improved from 7.44Mbps (July 2016) to 16.89Mbps (September 2020).