North African telcos boost network experience in 2022 - Opensignal

North Africa's operators have seen strong improvement in user experience during 2022 according to mobile analytics company Opensignal's newest Global Mobile Network Experience Awards.

In its fourth Global Awards report, Opensignal compared the experience of users on mobile networks around the world, across a number of categories, in the last six months of 2022 and compared that to data it collected in the last six months of 2021.

North African telcos stood out in the categories of voice app experience and mobile gaming user experience.

Inwi Morocco's network saw the greatest improvement in voice app experience for users during the period – increasing 16.6%, which moved its experience ranking when using over-the-top voice apps from the 'Very Poor' category to 'Acceptable'.

Out of all 32 Global Rising Stars for voice app experience, Inwi is the only operator to go up in two categories, Opensignal said.

Source: Opensignal's 2023 Global Mobile Network Experience Awards.

Voice app experience has traditionally been a category that African telcos have lagged behind in but in 2022 in total there were eight standouts from Africa and the Middle East in this category.

This included all three of Morocco's national operators – Inwi, Maroc Telecom and Orange – and also Orange Egypt, which saw the second largest percentage improvement in the voice app experience category overall of 13%.

Etisalat in Egypt also increased its voice app experience by 8.1% in 2022.

Gaming experience

Mobile gaming experience was another category where North African operators improved. When looking specifically at percentage improvement in Opensignal user's experience when playing multiplayer mobile games over cellular connections, out of the 30 operators which improved the most, 12 hail from Africa and the Middle East.

The operator with the greatest global percentage improvement of 47.4% was Orange Morocco and its national rival Inwi was in second place with a 44.3% improvement. Meanwhile another Moroccan operator, Maroc Telecom, came in fifth, improving 35.8%.

Egyptian operators also showed improvement with Orange Egypt coming in 11th place with a 30.2% improvement and Etisalat in Egypt in 14th place, improving 24.2%. Ooredoo in Tunisia was in 15th place with an improvement of 23.6%.

Source: Opensignal's 2023 Global Mobile Network Experience Awards.

Orange Morocco also was recognized for a 44.1% increase in average upload speeds compared to the previous year, while Orange Egypt recorded 33.6% improved average upload speeds.

*Top image source: Image by garetsvisual on Freepik.

— Paula Gilbert, Editor, Connecting Africa