Glo leads in NIWBQR 4G/LTE broadband study ranking
National Independent Wireless Broadband Quality Report (NIWBOR) has released study of broadband quality of experience as well as technical quality of the networks.
NIWBOR returned a not very favourable study using the proprietary methods to rank service providers according to the quality of wireless broadband service experienced in their networks.
It showed that out of the five networks covered in the report, Glo stood out in uplink and downlink application layer throughputs.
The report commissioned by Enextgen Wireless, compared the services of Glo; MTN; Estream; Ntel; and Smile on January 11 in the same area in Victoria Island.
NIWBOR paid for the SIM with the highest throughput offered by each of the service providers in order to perform simultaneous FTP data transfers and Pings on all five networks.
The throughputs and other performance measurement indicators recorded are therefore those that customers with similar subscriptions are likely to experience.
NIWBQR said that “MTN did not have contiguous LTE service along the driven route. As such, some of the application layer throughput recorded for MTN was in UMTS. The logged data contains detailed over-the-air messages that can help the service provider identify the source of performance issues on its network. We can make the data available to the service provider for a fee.”
The report went further to provide short comments on the performance of each of the five service providers including a justification of its ranking.
For Glo, NIWBQR said that the network had excellent RF coverage and quality and there was no evidence of any common Radio Frequency (RF) performance issues – RRC Call Drops, RRC Connection Failures, Handoff failures, excessive call setup delays and so on.
On smile, it said “Lower uplink and downlink application layer throughputs than most. This might be due to undeclared throughput cap imposed by the service provider, since the peak throughputs are higher than those of others. RF coverage is unimpressive. We rank Smile number 2 primarily because it has higher service accessibility rate than MTN and better coverage than Ntel. Smile has some Radio Frequency performance issues such as high RRC Call Drop rate. Some of this might be due to insufficient RF coverage”.
For MTN, the report said that MTN has very good mean application layer uplink and downlink throughputs which are very comparable to those obtained in Glo.
“We rank it lower than Smile due to RF performance issues such as higher RRC Call Drop rate and RRC Call Setup failure rate than Smile. However, it has much lower packet delay (latency) than Smile as well as higher RF coverage. We rate service accessibility highly. But for that, MTN might have a higher ranking than Smile” NIWBOR stated.
Elsewhere, it said that Ntel has the highest peak uplink and downlink throughputs.
“However, mean throughputs are relatively low. This might be due to undeclared throughput cap. Packet latency is relatively high. And there are obvious RF performance issues manifested in high RRC Call Drops. Overall, we conclude that Ntel should be ranked as fourth among the five Communications Service Providers evaluated,” the report added.
Although Estream ranks 3rd in RF coverage and second in latency, we rank it lowest for the following reasons: It shows the lowest peak physical layer throughput.
“It shows substantial RF performance issues such as a high number of RRC Call Drops and Handoff failures. It shows very low service accessibility rate,” it added.
