Once again, Maxis and Celcom dominate the winner’s list. However, given the recent COVID-19 outbreak which has put additional strain on the country’s network, there is more to the story than just keeping track of bragging rights that local telcos can claim against each other. Nevertheless, let’s start with the results. In the September 2020 report, Maxis has been declared as the best telco for Video Experience, Games Experience, and Download Speed Experience in which the telco had won in the first rendition of the 2020 Opensignal Mobile Experience Awards for Malaysia back in April.
Interesting enough, U Mobile has managed to snatch the Upload Speed Experience award from Maxis in this round. The telco has also sneaked into the Voice App Experience category as its joint winner alongside unifi who won in April. Just like in the beginning of the year, Celcom once again took 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience under its wings for the September edition of 2020 Opensignal Mobile Experience Awards for Malaysia. Meanwhile, Opensignal has omitted the Latency Experience award for this edition though, as this category had been discontinued in May 2020.
Winners aside, if you take a closer look at the numbers for each category and compare them to the April report, you would notice that the performance of almost all telcos in Malaysia have dropped. For example, the average download speed for Maxis has dropped from 20.4Mbps to 14.5Mbps which is a decline of around 29% even though it is still leading the market. The telco’s upload speed has also dropped at around a 26% rate, from 7.7Mbps to 5.7Mbps.
Another market leader, Celcom also experienced around a 20% drop in average download speed, making way for Digi to edge the telco in this category although with a very tiny margin. Similarly, the telco has also experienced around a 22% drop in average upload speed. As far as average download and upload speed are concerned, somehow U Mobile showed an improvement of 36% and 8%, respectively. Meanwhile, nothing much has changed for unifi which is the smallest telco by subscribers’ size among the five listed here.
Another interesting statistic that Opensignal’s September report has revealed is the significant decline in terms of gaming experience among all five telcos. According to their scores, all of them have received a Poor rating which is far off from the Average to Good classifications that they received back in April. As pointed out earlier, the noticeable decline in performance among Malaysian telcos is likely to do with increased usage during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, things are already recovering according to Opensignal which means the next report should look much better.
