Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) conducted benchmark measurements of mobile voice telephony and data services in Uganda to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) received by users/consumers of these services in the period September to November 2019. The operators whose services were considered under this exercise were; MTN Uganda Limited, Airtel Uganda Limited and Africell Uganda Limited.
UCC’s bench-marking exercise was carried out from the end user perspective in twenty (20) towns across the country namely; Mbarara, Kabale, Moroto, Kasese, Hoima, Mubende, Arua, Mbale, Tororo, Soroti, Lira, Kampala, Mukono, Jinja, Masaka, Mityana, Entebbe, Masindi, Fort Portal and Gulu.
Read About:
This was done on both voice and data services, and from the results, Airtel Uganda a maximum of 14 Mbps in areas like Mityana and Soroti and an scared about 7 Mbps average in Kampala. We think this all thanks to their 4G everywhere strategy they recently unveiled. Africell and MTN had about 3.9 Mbps and 5.9 Mpbs average respectively in Kampala. Africell best download throughput (data speeds) performance was in Moroto at 5.7 Mbps and had speeds below 2 Mbps in towns like Mbarara and Kabale.
MTN was second scoring a maximum of 7 Mbps in Kasese and also registering low throughputs less than 2 Mbps in towns like Arua and Gulu.
There are many reasons why companies register different results and data speeds will be affected by the backhaul planning (the data speeds supported by each site), interference, spectrum planning, devices being used (3G or 4G), network congestion.
Congestion, on the other hand, typically occurs in a network when or where there is a higher number of users trying to access the data resources at the same time than the capacity available on the network in that location at that particular time. This scenario may occur in two (2) ways
- Due to unpredictable situations that occur on an irregular basis such as a temporary inflow of a large number of people to a location for an event like a concert or rally
- Occurrence on a regular basis due to a failure by the respective operator to meet the increasing traffic levels in an area with sufficient network capacity enhancement.
The QoS of a network can and may be different at different locations across the network or in the same location when measured at different times. (QoS) is defined as the totality of characteristics of a telecommunications service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs of the user of the service. QoS covers the entire communication path from end-to-end between user-to-user or user-to-content
