Thailand Mobile Network Experience Report April 2020

Thailand’s mobile network experience keeps getting better.  Since the last Opensignal report, there have been some impressive improvements across the board from all three operators. 

4G accessibility in Thailand is approaching near ubiquitous levels.  TrueMove H and DTAC have broken through the 90% mark for our 4G Availability metric joining AIS – the first Thai operator to achieve the same in our last report. This means that our Thai 4G users, on average, are now able to connect to 4G services more than 90% of the time regardless of the network they were on.  AIS also won our inaugural 4G Coverage Experience award in Thailand, TrueMove H finished second, while DTAC was further behind.

In this report, AIS won four out of seven award categories — Games Experience, Voice App Experience, 4G Availability and 4G Coverage Experience.

Games Experience

In this report, we take our first look at the Games Experience in Thailand at the operator level. Our brand-new metric measures how mobile users experience real-time multiplayer mobile gaming like Fortnite, Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG and Garena Freefire on an operator’s network.

AIS became the first Thai operator to win our Games Experience award, followed by DTAC in second place. While both operators earned a Fair rating (65-75), TrueMove H narrowly missed the same rating and ended up in the Poor category (40-65).

A Fair Games Experience rating means most users deemed the experience “average”; it also indicates that the gameplay experience is generally controllable, with the majority of users noticing a delay between their actions and the outcomes in the game. And as we descend down to the Poor rating, most users find the experience unacceptable, with increased delays and lack of controllability in gameplay.

Regional highlights:

In our regional breakdown, we examined 27 provinces of Thailand on our six primary metrics.  AIS shone in our new measure of Games Experience, by winning individually in 22 provinces and drawing in a further five, including two — Krabi and Surin — where it tied with DTAC, one in Si Sa Ket with TrueMove H, and a three-way split in Kanchanaburi. Meanwhile, across all the provinces examined, our users enjoyed a Good Games Experience (75-85) in 12 provinces on AIS’s network.

In Bangkok, one operator prevailed on almost all our metrics, and with a substantial lead in most of them. Our users on AIS’s network, experienced the fastest upload and download speeds of 14.9 Mbps and 9.9 Mbps respectively, enjoyed the best Games Experience and Voice App Experience with a Good rating, and saw the highest 4G Availability of 96%, in the capital. Only in Video Experience, they were at par with their Truemove H counterparts, as both the operators rated Very Good in this category, which means that users observed fast loading times and only occasional stalling while streaming videos on their mobile phones.

The national results were also mirrored in Voice App Experience: AIS triumphed in 20 provinces, and tied for the first place in the remaining seven with either or both the rival operators. Our Thai users perceived a Good (80-87) Voice App Experience in 14 provinces on AIS’s network, which is superior to the average national experience.

In Video Experience, TrueMove H won in 9 provinces, and drew for the first place in a further 17 provinces — including four with AIS, 12 with DTAC, and a three-way-draw in Samut Sakhon. Meanwhile, DTAC’s sole win in this category was in Nakhon Si Thammarat. That said, our users enjoyed the best Video Experience on TrueMove H’s network in Nonthaburi.

Looking at our speed measurements, in Download Speed Experience, we saw a close-run race with all three operators ending up in a dead heat in multiple provinces. DTAC individually won this category in five provinces, while AIS won in three of them. In Thailand, across all networks, our users on AIS’s network in Nonthaburi enjoyed the fastest Download Speed Experience of 17.2 Mbps, on average.