There is a fairly common set of steps that consumers follow should their internet connectivity prove spotty or slower than expected – log online and do a speed test.

Given that most, if not all, connectivity packages sold in South Africa are tiered across different upload/download speeds, it makes sense to check the health of your network by ensuring you’re getting the speed you pay for monthly.

For global connectivity analyst firm Opensignal, however, this only paints part of the picture, and is not a true reflection of a quality service from network operators.

The company has in recent months released a handful of reports looking at network experience across the world, and looked specifically at South Africa in its analysis, looking at not only 4G/5G speeds, but also network availability and consistency in order to generate its overall rankings.

To learn a bit more about why speed should not be the defining characteristic by which a consumer or business measures a network operator before selecting a package, we sat down with Opensignal’s principal data analyst, Robert Wyrzykowski, at MWC 25 last week.

Here is what he had to share.

“What matters and what we are currently focusing on, is whether your network experience is more consistent,” he explained.

This according to the analyst, is because for the large portion of consumers, namely those not going for the wildly expensive gigabit lines, there comes a point where the difference between broadband and fibre are negligible in terms of pure speed alone.

“You can have 400Mbps average on 5G, but if you suffer several signal failures, it does not matter. So what is why network experience is becoming more important than network speed in our opinion,” he pointed out. “There is a point where speed does not matter, and globally I think we are reaching this stage. For example, Netflix recommends 25Mbps for okay streaming,” Wyrzykowski continued.

Citing a recent Opensignal report done with US customers, he noted that they did not necessarily that speed is that important for them, with the number said to be around 15 percent mentioning it as a key consideration.

“The most important is cost of course, around 45 percent, but the second one is reliability, so people are fine with a good enough network experience as long as it meets their other needs and speed is becoming less of a requirement, especially on mobile and mobile devices,” shared Wyrzykowski.

From here, the analyst highlighted one of Opensignal’s increasingly important metrics – consistent quality – which looks at how successful the company’s tests are on a given network when downloading 5MB files. This along with other testing provides a clearer indication of network stability compared to simple out-and-out download speed.

“Can you complete the tasks you want, instead of just the amount of time?,” he posited.

Looking closer at the South African context, Cell C presented an interesting use case for Wyrzykowski and his team, with the embattled network recently being awarded by Opensignal for its performance over the 12 past months and in particular for winning the Global Rising Star for Video Experience and Upload Speed Experience.

“I’d say this is the categories which show the biggest progress over the year, so since they moved their network to Vodacom and MTN, we can see the improvement for the customers because while Cell C does not have its own infrastructure, they still have use their own spectrum bands that they purchased from ICASA, and they still have a lot of autonomy with their managing their network performance,” he noted.

“I would also say that Cell C is also a very special case globally, and does not happen often that one operator wraps up their infrastructure and moves as a network provider to another,” he added.

As for how South Africans can better ascertain how a network will deliver the best experience outside of speed, Opensignal points to one of two apps it makes publicly available on Android and iOS – Meteor.

Here it is specifically able to help users understand how their favourite or most-used apps will work with their current internet speed. “Get realistic speed and performance scores for 6 apps at a time, selected from 25 popular apps covering the most popular categories: social media, video and music streaming as well as your favorite gaming apps,” a description of the app featured.

[Image – Photo by Mike Maumeister on Unsplash]