A UK-based mobile analytics company recognized two leading mobile operators in the Philippines as global “rising stars” and the most improved carriers in terms of 4G availability and video experience.

Opensignal said in a report Smart Communications Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc. reached the category of global rising stars for 4G availability and video experience by showing scores comfortably above the global average.

Global rising stars is a category that celebrates the recent achievements of 30 operators where users saw the greatest improvement in mobile network experience between the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2020.

It awards four critical measures of the mobile network experience–video experience, download speed experience, upload speed experience and 4G availability.

Smart is a global rising Star for 4G availability as the average proportion of time that users on its network spent connected to 4G rose by 17.9 percent, an absolute increase of 13 percentage points between first half of 2019 and first half of 2020.

For the 4G availability awards, Opensignal measures the average proportion of time users spend with a 4G connection on each operator’s network.

“This citation is a testament to our commitment to improving the experience of our customers. As the country’s largest and only fully integrated telco, we will continue to invest in improving our network and our services, and we will benchmark our performance against countries like Vietnam and Thailand to be better. I think every Filipino deserves that kind of service,” said Smart president and chief executive Alfredo Panlilio. 

Globe is a global rising star for video experience as its score of the mobile experience rose by an impressive 32.7 percent.

Opensignal users on Globe’s network saw their average download speeds improve by 24.5 percent between first half of 2019 and first half of  2020.

“As one of the global rising stars recognized by Opensignal, Globe is proud to be a telco company that commits to improve data service to our subscribers. Expect more of these remarkable improvements as we continue with our aggressive efforts to upgrade the network for better connectivity and service,” said Globe chief technology and information officer Gil Genio.

For video experience awards, Opensignal measures the average video experience of users on 3G and 4G networks for each operator.

Its methodology involves measuring real-world video streams and uses an ITU-based approach for determining video quality.

The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account.The global winners for video experience are T-Mobile Netherlands and A1 in Austria. 

They are the only operators on which users reported average video experience scores above 80 points out of a possible 100.

Japan’s au is the global winner for 4G availability, with 4G users on its network spending a staggering 99 percent of their time connected to a 4G signal.

Japan SoftBank was tagged as global winner for voice app experience, with a score of 83.6 points out of a possible 100.