TELCO provider Smart seemed to have well prepared for the pandemic and the increase in the volume of subscribers dependent on online access from their homes, if the performance reports issued early this April were to be used as a basis.
The independent report by mobile analytics firm Opensignal which was released early this month showed how Smart performed. It showed how Smart had remained ahead of its competition and delivered even better performance in terms of video experience, upload and download speed experience, voice app experience and games experience.
The performance improvement was especially pronounced in 4G availability.
“Smart broke away from Globe in the six months since our last report to take the 4G availability award,” Opensignal said in its report available on its website.
“[Smart] increased its 4G availability ranking by 7.5 percentage points for a score of 81.8 percent, an increase over its score of 74.3 percent in our last report,
Opensignal also noted the increase in download speeds on Smart’s network.
“Smart won this category with users experiencing an overall download speed of 10.6 Mbps, that is a 12.8 percent increase over the 9.4 Mbps speed that we reported last September. It was also 3 Mbps faster than its rival,” Opensignal said, adding that in terms of upload speed, Smart’s score of 3.9 Mbps is better than the competitor’s score of 2 Mbps.
In terms of video experience, Smart posted a score of 55, well ahead of competition’s 39.8. This is 15.6 percent increase compared to last year’s rating of 47.6.
Smart posted these service quality improvements even though data traffic on its network has been growing rapidly over the past few years. In 2019, Smart’s mobile traffic jumped to 1.6 Exabytes — twice the volume in 2018 and four times that of 2017.
“We’ve managed to stay ahead of the growth of our data traffic by continuing to invest heavily in our network,” explained Mario G. Tamayo, senior vice president for Network Planning and Engineering for PLDT and Smart.
In 2019, Smart expanded its coverage and capacity further by increasing the number of its 4G/LTE stations by 51 percent to about 24,600, as well as its 3G base stations by about 19 percent to 13,800. As of end-December 2019, Smart’s mobile data service coverage reached 94 percent of the country’s population.
This was supported by the expansion of PLDT’s fiber optic footprint by 32 percent to 322,400 kilometers, the country’s most extensive digital backbone and transport network.
Opensignal report covers the period from November 1, 2019 to January 29, 2020. It is based on 659,883,359 measurements from 288,492 devices and includes a new metric called games experience, which measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network.
Notably, Smart is the first operator to be awarded this citation globally.
