Smart beats Globe in network consistent quality — report

PLDT wireless arm Smart Communications Inc. has toppled rival Globe Telecom in terms of providing consistent quality connections, according to the latest report from Canadian crowd-sourced mobile data company Tutela.

In its “Southeast Asia State of Mobile Networks” report, Tutela showed that Smart scored 91 percent in terms of “basic” consistent quality, which was slightly ahead of Globe’s 89.3 percent.

The outcome means that 91 percent of the time, Smart users were able to access a basic connection, which supports simple web browsing, emails, and simple applications like Facebook and WhatsApp.

The big difference between the rivals, however, came in the “excellent” category, the report showed.

Tutela revealed that Smart had a consistent quality score of 48.8 percent in the excellent category, more than double that of Globe’s score of 23.8 percent.

The excellent standard is needed for the more demanding mobile use cases, like HD video calling or 1080p video streaming.

In the excellent category, Smart ranked sixth out of the total 15 operators included in the study which covered Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand and included 85 billion mobile network measurements collected between Dec. 1, 2018 and Jan. 9, 2019.

“Smart has a small lead over Globe when it comes to basic quality, but excellent quality is where it really differentiates its network,” Tutela said in its report.

“Our continuing network upgrades across the country are aimed to address our customers’ ever-growing need for high quality mobile internet services. Today, our customers are increasingly using high-bandwidth services such as video streaming aside from social media, online shop- ping and mobile banking,” PLDT-Smart senior vice president for network planning and engineering Mario Tamayo said.

Tutela used a metric called “consistent quality score” in its study which tracked the percentage of time users can experience either excellent or basic quality connections in a country or in a specific network.

“If a connection hits the excellent standard, it’s sufficient for the most demanding mobile use-cases, like HD video calling or 1080p video streaming. A basic connection is good enough for simple web browsing, emails, and VOIP calling, but users will experience delays or buffering when trying to use more demanding apps,” Tutela said.

On the country level, the Philippines posted a basic consistent quality score of 90 percent, ranking third among the four Southeast Asian countries included in the study.

Thailand led with a score of 92.5 percent, followed by Malaysia with 92.3 percent, while Indonesia had 88.1 percent.