MTN South Africa has edged ahead of rival Vodacom in offering the best video streaming experience, according to a new report from OpenSignal.
However, it was a close-run affair, with Vodacom nipping closely at MTN’s heels.
“South Africa’s other national operators did not perform too badly, and the gap between the leaders and Cell C and Telkom was closer than we’ve typically seen across our other metrics,” the company said.
OpenSignal is a mobile analytics company that measures consumers’ real-world mobile network experience. It collects more than three billion measurements each day from over 100 million smartphones globally.
Its new video experience analysis calculated a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the best video experience possible.
In South Africa, both MTN and Vodacom received a “good” score (55-65), while the country’s other two operators landed in the “fair” (40-55) category.
“We define a ‘good’ score as characterised by video streamed from the Internet to a phone or tablet rendering at both low and high resolutions, but exhibiting some loading time before playback begins and some stalling, especially at HD resolutions. Meanwhile, our users on a network with a fair score would typically experience long loading times and frequent stalling at high resolutions, but better quality at low resolutions.”
MTN and Vodacom’s scores were in the middle of the “good” category. Vodacom’s score of 58.6 put it within three points of MTN’s 60.9, while Cell C and Telkom brought up the rear with scores of 50.2 and 46.7 respectively.
South Africa fared well relative to the rest of the world. Its national score of 55.9 landed it distinctly mid-table among the 69 countries analysed, and the country beat some more developed mobile markets, including France, Ireland and Russia. The global winner was the Czech Republic. — (c) 2018 NewsCentral Media
