Super Internet growth and healthy competition for Myanmar
According to the last GSMA report, Myanmar is among the top 4 countries with the fastest growth in Internet penetration over the past 5 years. The country’s internet penetration jumped from 10% to 40% in 5 years!
A few days ago, OpenSignal released its quarterly report regarding the mobile operator performance in Myanmar.
The last quarter was strongly dominated by Mytel, the 4th and last player that entered the Myanmar telecom market in 2018.
When it comes to the telecom market in Myanmar, do not take anything for granted, things change pretty quickly and it definitely reflects in this new report.
This quarter, Mytel retains the 4G Availability award, its subscribers spending 90% of their time in 4G. It also keeps the 4G Coverage Experience. But that is it!
Telenor big return on mobile performance
Telenor has made huge progress this quarter and grabs four awards and a tie on Video experience with Mytel.
Telenor improvement on download speed for instance is spectacular. The Norwegian operator was ranked fourth in the last quarter and is now winning the award with a 4.8Mbps improvement in speed.
Myanmar gamers will be pleased to know that Telenor is also the best network for gaming. OpenSignal gaming experience measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on a mobile operator network.
Telenor also cleans out the Voice App Experience and Upload Speed experience making it the clear winner of this quarter from a performance perspective.
Overall, every mobile operator’s performance score has declined over this quarter. One reason to explain that is the COVID-19 situation in Myanmar which pushes people to adopt new habits.
Similar to other countries, data consumption has exploded as people are instructed to work from home. With the limitations enforced on social areas, people are also increasing their use of online entertainment which also drives data usage. The lockdown also affects the mobile operators in the sense that they optimized the network based on people’s location and daily commute. As these habits completely changed with the lockdown, the current optimization is not effective anymore. Telecom operators need to re-adjust their network to the new status quo which explains the drop this quarter on overall network performance.
Ooredoo wins on mobile data price
On the regular data plans, mobile operators are standing really close together. Ooredoo is on average the cheapest per MB (Ks 0.97) but there is only a 10% difference between the most expensive (MPT) and Ooredoo.
Paradoxically, the cheapest package in the market is MPT with 699Ks for 400MB.
From a price per GB perspective, the cheapest package in the market is owned by Telenor: 15,872 MB for Ks 14,999.
Herbert is a nom de plume.
I am an experienced telecom professional blogging about the fastest growing Internet market in the world: Myanmar.
More like this in the future please!
Will do, sir!