MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Customer Experience Index, H2 2016

The quality of experience delivered by mobile data networks is a key indicator of current performance, and a foundation of future prospects in digital. Our MobiNEX ranking, updated with data from H2 2016, compares 80 operators across 25 countries. Over the past six months we have seen some big changes, particularly in China and the UK.

Executive summary

STL Partners’ MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index ranks mobile network operators by key measures relating to customer experience. To do this, we benchmark mobile operators’ network speed and reliability, allowing individual operators to see how they are performing in relation to the competition in an objective and quantitative manner.

Operators are assigned an individual MobiNEX score out of 100 based on their performance across four measures that STL Partners believes to be core drivers of customer app experience: download speed, average latency, error rate and latency consistency (the proportion of app requests that take longer than 500ms to fulfil). Our partner Apteligent has provided us with the raw data for three out of the four measures, based on billions of requests made from tens of thousands of applications used by hundreds of millions of users in H2 2016.

This is the third iteration of MobiNEX, and it covers the same 80 operators and 25 markets as in our H1 2016 report. As before, we have observed clustering in the performance of operators from the same country. The top ten operators were from Japan, France, and Canada, joined by one Mexican operator:

• First, second and third place are once again held by SoftBank JP (85 out of 100, +2 since H1), Bouygues FR (75, -5) and Free FR (74, -5), with high scores across all measures.
• They are followed by NTT Docomo JP (69, -9), Movistar MX (a new entrant with 68, +8) and au (KDDI) JP (67, -4), the Canadian operators – Rogers CA (65, +3), Bell CA (65, +6) and Telus CA (62, +4) – and Orange FR (60, -15).

The bottom ten all score 12 or lower out of 100, substantially below the median of 40, and have a materially worse customer app experience:

• Joint-last with the lowest possible score of one point on all measures are Smart PH (4, -1) and Etisalat EG (4, no change).
• Vodafone EG (7, +3), Vivo BR (8, -8), Globe PH (9, +4), Beeline RU (10, -1), Digi MA (9, -2), U Mobile MA (9, -2) and MTS RU (12, -10) all record slightly better latency consistency scores, but are still well below par for error rate, download speed and average latency.

For the first time, we have assigned scores using the same benchmarks as in the previous report, which allows us to identify improvement and degradation in performance.

• On average, operators’ MobiNEX scores have fallen two points since H1 – what has driven this change is unclear.
• The UK records an average score 17 points lower than in H1, driven by the fact that all four UK operators recorded a lower error rate score than in H1. This points to a possible national issue leading to increased error rate, rather than operator-specific degradation.
• The biggest improvement comes from operators in China, which jumps from 14th to 5th place on our country ranking. This is in no small part due to the greatly improved performance of China Telecom (55, +33), which has invested heavily in its 4G infrastructure.