WITH the significant surge in mobile data usage during the quarantine, the quality of mobile video in the Philippines has deterioriated, according to the latest report of independent mobile analytics frm Opensignal.
Video has been a big driver of data consumption in the country, and with measures such as the general community quarantine (GCQ) and enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) imposed in response to Covid-19, Filipinos are consuming videos on Youtube, Netflix and other online streaming services more than ever, putting the mobile networks under pressure.
Opensignal said mobile networks in the Philippines are more resilient in urban areas than in rural during the crisis.
“As operators in the Philippines reported a dramatic surge in data consumption, we found that the quality of the video streaming experience over 4G connections was resilient. 4G video experience in March declined by just 7.2 percent in urban areas when compared with the experience seen by users the previous month. The urban change was half the drop seen in the rural areas where the 4G Video Experience score fell by 14.7 percent,” Opensignal said.
Opensignal said a number of factors affect the quality of video during crisis.
“One of these is the change in location of mobile usage – thousands of Filipinos working in cities moved out to their second residences or hometowns in the suburbs or rural areas to avoid being quarantined in the city. This means that users are spending more time in locations where the network infrastructure does not normally support such large numbers of users and this new traffic pattern,” Opensignal said.
Despite the decline, the typical 4G video experience in the Philippines ranges from fair to good, which suggests mobile operators have been able to cope well during these extraordinary times.
However, between September 2019 and February 2020, 4G video experience had improved in a majority of the regions. While rural users in the Mindanao region saw the biggest improvement of 23.3 percent, urban users saw the highest improvement of 9.1 percent in the National Capital Region (NCR) In the remaining regions (urban and rural areas combined),the experience improved between 2.9 percent to 7.8 percent, with the exception of the rural areas of the Visayas region.
In this analysis, Opensignal examined the mobile experience in urban and rural areas of five macro-regions – Mindanao, North and Central Luzon, South Luzon, Visayas and the NCR – for a period of seven months ending on March 31, using the urban/rural definitions from Philippine Statistics Authority.
