The Bangladeshi mobile network market continues to be a two-horse race between Grameenphone and Banglalink.
The country’s telecom operators Grameenphone and Banglalink have outperformed other operators in mobile network experience, according to a report by Opensignal, a UK-based independent global standard for analyzing consumers' mobile experience.
Grameenphone, yet again scooped up the most awards by a close margin, winning four for — Upload Speed Experience, 4G Coverage Experience, Excellent Consistent Quality and Core Consistent Quality awards.
It was also the joint winner in three categories: Video Experience, Availability and 4G Availability, alongside Banglalink.
In the last two categories, Grameenphone was the joint winner with both Banglalink and Robi.
Meanwhile, Banglalink won or tied first place across all three experiential categories, winning Games Experience and Voice App Experience.
However, it ranked top in Download Speed Experience.
On the other hand, neither Robi nor TeleTalk won any awards outright, but Robi was part of the three-way ties for Availability and 4G Availability.
When it comes to service quality and capabilities, the main competition in Bangladesh’s mobile phone service sector is between private companies and the company that is far behind in this race is the state-owned telecom operator.
According to the recently prepared report - based on data collected between April 1 and June 29, 2022-Banglalink topped in download speed, Grameenphone ranked top in fastest upload.
Grameenphone also achieved a clean sweep in the Consistency category winning both the Excellent Consistent Quality and Core Consistency awards outright.
This means that it was on Grameenphone’s network that the highest proportion of users’ tests met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for demanding applications (Excellent Consistent Quality) such as completing group video calls as well as the thresholds for less demanding applications (Core Consistent Quality) like web browsing.
As per the report, Grameenphone users saw the fastest upload speeds making the operator the sole winner of the Upload Speed Experience award again, with a score of 4.1 Mbps, giving it a lead of 0.7 Mbps over second-placed Banglalink’s 3.4 Mbps.
Meanwhile, in the same category, Robi ranked third with 2.7 Mbps, while TeleTalk was even further behind given its score of 1.4 Mbps.
Banglalink won the Download Speed Experience award with the operator's users seeing the fastest average download speeds in Bangladesh, with a score of 10 Mbps, 1.2 Mbps ahead of second-placed Grameenphone.
Robi and TeleTalk ranked in third and fourth place, respectively, with scores of 6.8 Mbps and 4.4 Mbps.
Banglalink also won the Games Experience and Voice App Experience awards as the operator's customers had the best available experience in playing multiplayer mobile games or using over-the-top voice apps over cellular connections on Banglalink’s network.
The operator was also the winner of both the Games Experience and Voice App Experience awards, with a score of 37.5 points and 66.1 points in the categories consecutively on a 100-point scale.
In terms of coverage, Grameenphone users are connected to 4G in most locations as per the report of Opensignal.
Grameenphone was the winner of the 4G Coverage Experience award, given its score of 7.3 points on a 10-point scale, having a lead of 0.6 points over second-placed Robi’s 6.7 points.
In the spectrum auction conducted by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) in the first quarter of 2022, both Grameenphone and Robi won the rights to use 60 MHz of 2.6 GHz spectrum.
Banglalink and TeleTalk purchased 40 MHz and 30 MHz, respectively, of spectrum in the 2.3 GHz band.
None of the operators were available for comments at the time of filing of this report.