National Independent Wireless Broadband Quality Report (NIWBQR) has returned a not very favourable study of broadband quality of experience as well as technical quality of the networks.
NIWBQR which uses proprietary methods to rank service providers according to the quality of wireless broadband service experienced in their networks however reported that of the five networks covered in the report that 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.
Accordingly, 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”.
