ISLAMABAD: All Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) have shown poor performance in data services, as the companies not achieving more than 21-52 percent Network Performance Score (NPS) points for data services, says the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).
The PTA has conducted second nationwide NPS benchmarking campaign from 11th January to 2nd February 2022 in various cities, towns, and motorways/ highways throughout Pakistan to assess quality and performance of mobile networks in line with the latest NPS methodology.
A total of five cities, four towns, and four motorways/ highways were surveyed and more than 15,000 voice calls were made and 45,000 data tests were performed.
The QoS test covered an area including cities, towns, and roads in federal and provincial capitals of approximately 4,522km in length.
The NPS is a harmonised and integrative scoring methodology standardised by European Telecommunica-tions Standards Institute (ETSI) that characterises the overall network performance based on automated tests with commercial smartphones simulating the typical end-user behaviour (voice call, browsing, etc) in a public network.
The NPS enables telecom regulators to compare and assess the quality of all mobile networks based on international standard KPIs. The NPS is now part of Cellular Mobile Network Quality of Service (QoS) Regulations, 2021 issued by the PTA.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of Voice and Data Services have been analysed as per the NPS standard. Summary of the results is as under: All CMOs have shown overall good results for Voice Services, as the companies achieved 64-80% NPS points, with Ufone in the leading position. Ufone and ZonG have shown the best Voice Success Ratio.
Ufone has the best Call Setup Time while ZonG has the best Voice Quality/ Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Jazz is also good in Call Drop Ratio. High share of usage of GSM Network is visible on Jazz network even in cities. There is great room for Jazz and Telenor to improve Call Setup Success Ratio.
All CMOs have shown poor performance in Data Services, as the companies not achieving more than 21- 52 percent NPS points for Data Services. Ufone has achieved the best Overall Success Ratio. In HTTP DL/UL Throughput, there is great room for improvement for each operator. Video Quality and Setup Time are on a very good level, but Web Browsing Duration has also show room for improvement for each operator. Jazz and ZonG are using LTE Carrier Aggregation with up to 30MHz bandwidth, while Ufone uses only 1xLTE carrier with mainly 15MHz bandwidth in Cities and 10MHz in Towns. Telenor uses LTE Carrier Aggregation, but with maximal bandwidth of 15MHz.
Ufone secured highest score in the overall benchmarking campaign, whereas ZonG is on the second place followed by Jazz and Telenor. The overall NPS scores of Ufone, ZonG, Jazz, and Telenor are 634, 541, 503, and 384 points, respectively.
Ufone has the best overall Network Performance Score exceeding 600 points in total and having a comfortable advantage of 93 and 131 points to ZonG and Jazz positioned at the 2nd and 3rd place, respectively. Telenor is at 4th with the lowest score.
Best Voice Service is offered by Ufone, followed by ZonG, Jazz, and Telenor. The overall voice performance is on a good level for the two leading operators achieving more than 315+ points out of 400 maximum points.
Ufone also offers the best Data Service in this campaign with a significant margin to other CMOs. However, the overall data performance is fair for Ufone and quite poor for the others.
Based on this, the PTA has gained valuable insights about the performance of each mobile network operator. By making this survey public, the PTA is spurring competition among the operators to improve their existing infrastructure with the aim to increase country-wide mobile network quality. Bringing Pakistan’s LTE networks at par with the internationally adopted standards will lay the foundation for a future roll-out of 5G technology on a sound footing.
The PTA conducts nationwide mobile QoS Surveys on periodic basis in order to assess the network performance of all Cellular Mobile Operators (CMOs) with respect to licensed KPIs for voice, data and SMS services. Results are available at the PTA’s website for awareness of subscribers besides taking the same with concerned operator(s) for required actions to improve services wherever required, it added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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