3 seconds for mobile video to loadon Singapore’s 4G networks

In Opensignal’s recent State of Mobile Video report, we lauded Singapore’s high achievements in Video Experience. It was one of a handful of countries that earned a Very Good score on our 100-point Video Experience scale, and individually, all three of Singapore’s major operators met the same high standard in our operator breakdown of video quality. But what’s behind that “Very Good” score? We thought this would be a good opportunity to examine the particulars of operators’ high ratings in Singapore over LTE networks, which account for the vast majority of our video tests in the country. We focused on two major components of our Video Experience calculation: 4G Video Loading Time and 4G Video Stalling Occurrence.

Our first metric, 4G Video Loading Time, is fairly self-explanatory. It’s the average period of time mobile users have to wait for a streamed video to begin playing over an LTE connection. Singapore consumers, quite frankly, don’t spend much time staring at loading icons as you can see in our first chart. The longest Video Load Time in our measurements was on Starhub’s networks, and that wait was only 2.7 seconds. Singtel and M1 were statistically tied at 2.4 seconds, making them incrementally faster in Video Load Time than StarHub, but the differences between the three were practically negligible.

Our next metric 4G Video Stalling Occurrence measures the proportion of users that experience an interruption in playback after a video begins streaming. If a video halts to buffer or stutters due to a weak connection, then those moments when pictures aren’t moving are all factored into our Video Stalling Occurrence metric.

While 10% 4G Video Stalling Occurrence isn’t uncommon even in countries with advanced 4G infrastructures, Singapore’s operators came in well under that mark. Starhub had the highest rate of stalling at 4.3% in our analysis, followed by Singtel at 2.9%, but the real star of the show was M1. Its 4G Video Stalling Occurrence score was just 1.6%, meaning interruptions in video playback were rare among our users.

No single factor explains why mobile video quality is so good in Singapore. It’s true that Singapore is one of the fastest countries in the world when it comes to download, but while speed does have some impact on Video Experience, faster isn’t always better when it comes to video quality. Countries with higher download speed averages than Singapore actually often do much worse in Video Experience, according to our analysis. Latency has a bearing on Video Loading time, as the faster a video request traverses the network the sooner that content begins buffering and playback starts. And our analysis has shown Singapore’s operators are among the best in the world in maintaining nimble, low-latency networks.