MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index, H1 2016

The quality of experience delivered by operators’ mobile data networks is a key indicator of their current performance, and a foundation of their future prospects in digital. Our MobiNEX ranking, updated this week for H1 2016, shows how 80 operators in 25 countries compare. How does your telco stack up?

Executive Summary

In response to customers’ growing usage of mobile data and applications, in April 2016 STL Partners developed MobiNEX: The Mobile Network Experience Index, which 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 H1 2016. While our April report focused on the top three or four operators in just seven Western markets, this report covers 80 operators drawn from 25 markets spread across the globe in the first six months of this year.

The top ten operators were from Japan, France, the UK and Canada:

• Softbank JP scores highest on the MobiNEX for H1 2016, with high scores across all measures and a total score of 85 out of 100.
• Close behind are Bouygues FR (80) and Free FR (79), which came first and second respectively in the Q4 2015 rankings. Both achieve high scores for error rate, latency consistency and average latency, but are slightly let down by download speed.
• The top six is completed by NTT DoCoMo JP (78), Orange FR (75) and au (KDDI) JP (71).
• Slightly behind are Vodafone UK (65), EE UK (64), SFR FR (63), O2 UK (62) and Rogers CA (62). Except in the case of Rogers, who score similarly on all measures, these operators are let down by substantially worse download speeds.

The bottom ten operators all score a total of 16 or lower out of 100, suggesting a materially worse customer app experience.

• Trailing the pack with scores of 1 or 2 across all four measures were Etisalat EG (4), Vodafone EG (4), Smart PH (5) and Globe PH (5).
• Beeline RU (11) and Malaysian operators U Mobile MY (9) and Digi MY (9) also fare poorly, but benefit from slightly higher latency consistency scores. Slightly better overall, but still achieving minimum scores of 1 for download speed and average latency, are Maxis MY (14) and MTN ZA (12).

Overall, the extreme difference between the top and bottom of the table highlights a vast inequality in network quality customer experience across the planet. Customer app experience depends to a large degree on where one lives. However, our analysis shows that while economic prosperity does in general lead to a more advanced mobile experience as you might expect, it does not guarantee it. Norway, Sweden, Singapore and the US market are examples of high income countries with lower MobiNEX scores than might be expected against the global picture. STL Partners will do further analysis to uncover more on the drivers of differentiation between markets and players within them.

 

MobiNEX H1 2016 – included markets

MobiNEX H1 2016 – operator scores

 Source: Apteligent, OpenSignal, STL Partners analysis

 

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