Opensignal, a company that measures real world mobile network experience, released its latest ‘Malaysian Mobile Network Experience’ report, analysing mobile network experience for customers accros the main operators in the country: Celcom Axiata, Digi, Maxis, U Mobile, Unifi Mobile and Yes4G. The analysis was made at a national level as well as regionally across 14 Malaysian states/federal territories.
Maxis and Celcom generally dominate all the results however Celcom Axiata has more consistent experience across all key measurement, either at the top or comes in the second place. Celcom customers also enjoys better 4G LTE coverage in all states/federal territories compared to customers on Maxis, Digi, U Mobile and Unifi Mobile.
In Kuala Lumpur, the Celcom mobile network is superior than Maxis in terms of 4G availability, download and upload speeds, video experience and latency.
Maxis has the fastest average download speeds (4G/3G) in Johor, Kedah, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Pahang, Perak, Pulau Pinang, Putrajaya, Sabah, Sarawak while Celcom is faster in Kuala Lumpur, Kelantan, Selangor and Terengganu.
For the average upload speeds via 4G/3G, Maxis is faster in Johor, Kedah, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Perak, Pulau Pinang, Putrajaya while Celcom is better than Maxis in Kelantan, Kuala Lumpur, Pahang, Sabah, Sarawak (U Mobile has the top upload speed), Selangor and Terengganu.
At the national level, Maxis has the slowest average 3G upload speeds in the country at 0.7Mbps (700Kbps).
Key statistic of the report (Opensignal did not provide any statistic for Yes4G at the national level likely due to lack of coverage/data in certain states):
4G Availability:
- Celcom Axiata: 87.7%
- Maxis: 82.7%
- Unifi: 81.2%
- Digi: 78.5%
- U Mobile: 72.3%
4G/3G Video Experience:
- Celcom Axiata: 63.5 points
- Maxis: 62.1 points
- Digi: 56.2 points
- Unifi: 44.6 points
- U Mobile: 40.3 points
4G/3G Average Download Speeds:
- Maxis: 17Mbps
- Celcom Axiata: 16.3Mbps
- Digi: 11.1Mbps
- U Mobile: 7.5Mbps
- Unifi: 5.4Mbps
Average 4G Download Speeds:
- Maxis: 22Mbps
- Celcom Axiata: 18.7Mbps
- Digi: 14Mbps
- U Mobile: 9.6Mbps
- Unifi: 6.5Mbps
Average 3G Download Speeds:
- Celcom Axiata: 4.4Mbps
- Digi: 3.9Mbps
- Maxis: 3.8Mbps
- U Mobile: 3.2Mbps
- Unifi: 1.2Mbps
4G/3G Average Upload Speeds:
- Maxis: 6.6Mbps
- Celcom Axiata: 6.4Mbps
- U Mobile: 5.1Mbps
- Digi: 4Mbps
- Unifi: 3Mbps
Average 4G Upload Speeds:
- Maxis: 8.4Mbps
- Celcom Axiata: 7.5Mbps
- U Mobile: 7.1Mbps
- Digi: 5.4Mbps
- Unifi: 3.5Mbps
Average 3G Upload Speeds:
- Celcom Axiata: 1.1Mbps
- U Mobile: 1.1Mbps
- Unifi: 0.9 Mbps
- Digi: 0.8Mbps
- Maxis: 0.7Mbps
Average Latency Experience:
- Celcom Axiata: 43.2ms
- Maxis: 43.9ms
- Unifi: 46.9ms
- U Mobile: 50.7ms
- Digi: 52.2ms
4G Latency Experience:
- Maxis: 38.3ms
- Celcom Axiata: 40.3ms
- Digi: 41.5ms
- Unifi: 43.5ms
- U Mobile 43.7ms
3G Latency Experience:
- Celcom Axiata: 57.5ms
- Unifi: 60.5ms
- Maxis: 62ms
- U Mobile: 65.3ms
- Digi: 78.6ms
Key findings of Opensignal’s report include:
- Maxis and Celcom continue to dominate the national awards – between them winning 5 of the 6 categories reported by Opensignal. In many metrics Celcom and Maxis far outpaced their rivals.
- Celcom held its 4G Availability award and was far ahead of its competitors with an average score of 87.6%.
- Celcom grabs the Latency Experience award with users clocking the shortest ping time of 43.2 milliseconds.
- Maxis won Opensignal’s Download Speed Experience award averaging 17.7 Mbps. It also won the Upload Speed award averaging 6.6 Mbps. However, we also saw some impressive improvements in this category from Celcom who sprinted to challenge Maxis as it averaged Download Speed Experience of 16.3 Mbps and Upload Speed Experience of 6.4 Mbps, almost closing the gap.
- Real-world experience data shows download speeds don’t necessarily mean the best video experience, as although users experience the fastest Download Speeds on Maxis, they enjoyed the best Video Experience on Celcom’s award- winning network with a “Good” score of 63.5 in Opensignal’s 100-point Video Experience scale.
- Unifi managed to break the stranglehold by winning (with a score of 77.5) the newly introduced ‘Voice App Experience’ category, which was presented for the first time in this report. This metric measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services (mobile voice apps) such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger, etc., and was introduced to recognise the growing importance of these applications to users. Four out of the five major operators managed to achieve an Acceptable rating (7480) on the Opensignal’s 100-point scale.
For this report Opensignal collected and analysed over 1 billion measurements taken from 971,486 devices using the Opensignal App (Android/iOS) in Malaysia during a three-month period (June 2019 to August 2019). For more information, please visit the Opensignal website.
