Summary

In this analysis of speed test results taken in countries in the Middle East during February 2019 we compare download speeds between countries, between MNOs & ISPs within each country and also compare how performance varies across different subsidiaries of the major Telecom Groups.

Key Insights

• Middle East average download speed: 7.3 Mb/s

• Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan have above average download speeds

• Egypt and Kuwait have the slowest download speeds

• Vodafone in Qatar, Orange in Jordan and Vodafone Turkey are the fastest amongst MNOs & ISPs with download speeds over 10 Mb/s

• Inconsistent CDN peering impacts user experience

Country Ranking

Regional average download speed is 7.3 Mb/s.

Turkey (10.7 Mb/s), Qatar (9.0 Mb/s), Bahrain (8.4 Mb/s) and Jordan (8.1 Mb/s) top the chart with above Middle East average download speeds. Egypt (4.4 Mb/s) and Kuwait (5.7 Mb/s) have the poorest performance in our tests. These speeds are represented in the following chart.



How Telecom Groups Perform in Different Countries

There are a number of international MNOs & ISPs that offer services in more than one Middle East country:

Telecom Group	Number of Countries	Countries
Batelco	2	Bahrain and Jordan
Etisalat	3	Egypt, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates
Link.Net	2	Egypt and Jordan
Ooredoo	3	Kuwait, Oman and Qatar
Orange	2	Egypt and Jordan
STC / Viva	3	Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia
Vodafone	3	Egypt, Qatar and Turkey
Zain	4	Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

Our next chart superimposes the average speed for each country with the speeds for each Telecom Group so that we can see which Groups produce above or below average in each country that they operate in. Each country is given a unique colour in the following chart to allow a visual comparison of speeds for different Telecom Groups in each country.

Most Telecom Groups outperform the average in each country with the following exceptions:

• Batelco in Jordan

• Link.net in Jordan and Egypt

• Ooredoo in Qatar

• Vodafone in Turkey

• Zain in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait

Top MNOs & ISPs in each Country

In this section we look at how the most popular MNOs & ISPs perform in each country. The charts are in order of the fastest available download speeds with a consistent scale of up to 16 Mb/s to make comparison easier.

SpeedChecker Measurement Methodology

Data Collection

SpeedChecker collected data in all countries during the same period in February 2019 to ensure a fair comparison. We gathered many data points using the crowd sourced data samples collected in the field on mobile devices. During the time the data collection took place, SpeedChecker received over 60,000 data samples and the included statistics and analysis are based on this dataset.

It was important for us to not only measure the real speeds as experienced by the user but also to ensure that we measured to the same point to ensure a fair comparison. For this we included only measurements to one server in Amsterdam. Read the following section “Choice of measurement server” for more about this method.

Choice of measurement server

Every measurement methodology differs in the selection of measured server infrastructure. Some methodologies focus on on-net servers hosted in telecom premises and others focus off-net. SpeedChecker believes off-net servers’ measurements are representing real user experience better than on-net as most of the content accessible by end users lies off-net. Most of the content these days is hosted on CDN networks and the best way to measure most relevant download metrics is to choose popular CDN networks. However, as we learn in this report, not all ISPs and MNOs connect to CDNs directly (or peer) and that has major implications on performance.

One of the main advantages of CDN peering is to improve connection time and download speeds by bringing the content closer to the end user. Before we could analyse the speed results, we considered how widespread peering was and discovered that there was a variation between 0 and 100% use of local servers.

The chart above shows the percentage of results from each country that are routed via local Middle East Servers, Europe or Asia. Bahrain, Qatar and Oman are all above 50% Middle East server use with Bahrain at 100%. United Arab Emirates and Egypt have a very low use of local servers. In our case we have used the most popular CDN – Cloudflare.

Speeds achieved to local servers were, on average, around 30% faster than speeds routed via European servers but this is not available to the majority of users. Because of the unbalanced availability of this CDN peering we chose to limit our analysis to results from one particular server based in Amsterdam, Europe.

• No country will have an unfair advantage as would be the case if local servers were used

• The majority of content is still hosted in Europe which means the download speeds reflect actual usage for most of the content downloaded by the end user

It is acknowledged that the operators in some countries that are peering with CDNs will achieve better results than those shown in this report.

This is a report on the state of Fibre and 4G deployment in Riyadh based on data points collected by Speedchecker in September 2018. The report discusses the state of Fibre and Mobile coverage (the extent of coverage and the quality of service) and the Speedchecker Measurement Method. The conclusion shows how Riyadh is placed to take advantage of future improvements to networks.

Current Network Coverage in Riyadh

Summary of Network Coverage

The three main Internet providers in Riyadh are STC, Mobily and Zain. Only STC provide services over 4G, Fibre AND Copper. Mobily offer 4G and Fibre and Zain provide 4G but not Fibre or Copper. Riyadh has excellent 4G coverage and Fibre is well established in the centre of the city and plans are well underway to extend the coverage to the main city areas. Fibre beyond the main city areas is planned but not currently in progress.

Fibre Coverage

Fibre is widely available across Riyadh particularly in and close to the centre. The map shown below shows that coverage is poor in the South-West of the city and in the rural areas surrounding the city.

Fibre is provided by STC and Mobily with Mobily exclusively covering the South-West and ITC the North-East. Other existing areas are covered jointly by STC and Mobily.

The In Progress areas (yellow on the map) are either STC or ITC with some coverage being provided by Dawiyat.

Zain has no fibre coverage in Riyadh as at October 2018.

Fibre To The Home (FTTH) Coverage in Riyadh (January 2018)
Source: MCIT (https://www.mcit.gov.sa/en/wbsira-map)

4G Coverage

Riyadh has excellent 4G coverage with 4G being available in all urban districts and along the length of the main roads going into and out of the city.

Speedchecker Measurement Method

Speedchecker uses the billions of data points collected through its passive and active measurement technologies worldwide to provide insights to our customers. This is used by businesses to improve their service and by research establishments to provide invaluable information.

Each data point consists of many KPIs including speed, latency, location, connection type, device info. Our results focus on speed and latency as experienced on the device to provide insightful information on Quality of Service. More detail about the Speedchecker Measurement Method.

This data is then integrated into our customizable map-based dashboards for geospatial analysis.

STC Fibre Coverage

Riyadh has an ongoing plan to implement fibre broadband across the city. Our results clearly show a correlation between the speeds achieved in districts that have fibre and those that do not.

We analysed the fibre results from STC to see if they correlated with the rollout of fibre across Riyadh. Our results on the left show high-speed results in Red / dark orange and slower results in yellow / light orange. These can be compared with the green areas from the MICT rollout plan where fibre is already available and the yellow areas where it is in process. The blue areas show areas that are planned but not yet in process and it is in these areas that the speeds are low.

We are still analysing the results from Mobily fibre and will publish when the analysis is complete.

State of Riyadh Mobile Networks

Speed result data points collected from Riyadh in September 2018 were analysed and allowed the top 3 mobile providers to be compared.

By adding the download speed data to our districts map of Riyadh we can clearly see that STC provided the fastest download speeds followed by Mobily and finally Zain. The maps also show a consistent difference in speeds from district to district. Districts that are the fastest or slowest for one provider tend to be the fastest or slowest for the others even though their actual speeds may vary.

 

The following table illustrates the fastest and slowest districts in Riyadh based on the average mobile download speeds. The speeds highlighted in green represent the 5 fastest speeds by provider and the red speeds are the 5 slowest by provider. It is clear from this table and the maps above that STC are getting the fastest mobile speed test results and Zain the slowest.

 

Conclusion

Riyadh has excellent 4G coverage provided by STC, Mobily, Zain and other mobile operators. The MCIT (Ministry of Communications and Information Technology) plan for rolling out fibre across Riyadh is well-established and their progress map is accurate.

All 3 companies are providing a good service with STC having more coverage and faster speeds. Our report has highlighted some areas of Riyadh that could need some improvement in service and others that are doing very well. This may inform future plans for infrastructure changes.

This is a good foundation that should ensure Riyadh will be well-placed to continue to take advantage of improvements in technology such as 5G. This will ensure that businesses and residential users can continue to enjoy all the benefits that these advances bring.

Interested in more detailed information on the Internet quality and coverage in Middle East and beyond?

Contact us for more information

Hajj 2018: 2 Million visitors over 6 days

Between 19th and 24th August 2018 over 2 million visitors arrived in Mecca for Hajj. This annual pilgrimage to the holiest city for Muslims is associated with the Prophet Mohammed who is said to have lead his followers there before consecrating it to Allah. It is considered a religious duty for all adult worshippers who are able to undertake this pilgrimage at least once in their lives. This number of visitors more than doubles the usual 1.5 million population of Mecca causing almost unimaginable challenges to the city’s infrastructure. In this article we discuss just one of these challenges : mobile Internet speed and access. It is hard to imagine how the infrastructure could cope with the huge increase in demand.

Hajj 2017: Review

During Hajj in 2017 mobile data demand nearly doubled compared to 2016. Although an increase of 60-70% was anticipated the 100% jump was a surprise. This was attributed to the increase in popularity of YouTube and Snapchat. Despite the increased demand, 99% of calls were successful and 23,000 Terabytes of data were consumed. According to the UN Sustainable Development Goals report published in ITU News from September 2017 this was thanks to the deployment of 3700 ICT specialists and 13,000 2G, 3G and 4G mobile base stations in all Hajj cities. The report does not specify which Telcos were involved. Source: ITU News.

Hajj 2018: The Kingdom’s Initiative to Maximise Mobile Communication During Hajj

King Salman bin Abdulaziz and the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman issued a directive “to do everything possible to make it easy for pilgrims to perform the rituals of Hajj”. The initiative’s objective is to allow pilgrims to communicate with their families and enable them to access the digital services available in the Smart Hajj initiative, so that they can enhance their experience and allow them to take advantage of enhanced communication services, as per a release issued by the authorities.

In particular, a number of packages provided by some of the main mobile operators offered their customers 1 Gb for 48 hours. Source: https://www.tahawultech.com

The Challenges

The challenge of providing adequate mobile services during a large event is not simply trying to maintain the current service levels. It is also about balancing the needs of the visitors with key service areas that are essential during the event. Consideration must be given to protecting the critical infrastructure of the region to enable it to respond to serious incidents. One way this can be achieved is to ensure there is resilience and redundancy built in to the infrastructure. Consultation with interested parties is essential to ensure that the steps agreed will meet the essential needs of all concerned. A thorough risk and threat assessment will identify where the effort is required.

It is a balance between being good hosts to the visitors and ensuring a continuity of services for the locals. Short term measures and agreements will be a great help in achieving this balance and the generous provision of 1Gb over 48 hours in Mecca is one such example. This may be the headline initiative but it is clear that much more has been done in many other areas to ensure a successful Hajj.

Telco Infrastructure in Mecca

Mecca has an excellent 4G network covered by a number of major operators. Building on the improvements made for Hajj 2017 this has allowed them to improve the average download speed by 83% between 2017 and 2018. They will continue to improve as they roll out 5G and it is expected that this will be further improved as part of Saudi Vision 2030.

Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has been at the forefront of this with investment in FDD and TDD LTE spectrum assets. The rewards of this investment can be seen in our results which show STC outperform the other providers in our research.

Zain have also been investing in technologies that allow them to extract the best out of their infrastructure. They are also preparing for 5G rollout.

Mobily has partnered with Ericsson to deliver 4×4 MIMO and as with STC and Zain they are preparing a 5G rollout.

As the Telcos continue to improve installed and available capacity so the Internet speeds can be expected to increase.

Speedchecker measurement methodology

Ahead of Hajj, Speedchecker started data collection to gather as many data points in Mecca as possible before / during / after the event. The crowd sourced data samples were collected in the field using mobile phones carried by the pilgrims to Mecca. Measurements were run on mobile networks of the top providers using Android and iOS devices. The measurements were made towards local CDN PoP based in Riyadh. The recorded results are a good proxy for the internet quality users were experiencing in Mecca on their mobile devices. During the 15 days the data collection took place, Speedchecker received over 100,000 data samples and the included stats and analysis are based on this dataset.

Hajj 2018: The Results

The results show that not only did Mecca cope with the extra 2 million visitors they exceeded all expectations. It would be reasonable to expect that speeds would decline by up to 50% during Hajj when compared to the week before or the days after. However, the speed test result reveal that the steps taken in Mecca allowed visitors and locals to enjoy an increase in speed that was continued throughout the following days. Our analysis stops after the 26th August.

The chart shown below shows the median (middle value) of Mobily Mobile, Zain Mobile, STC Mobile and STC Fixed broadband. We only have STC data from 21st August (Hajj started on 19th) and we have separated the STC Mobile tests from the STC Fixed Broadband tests. There is an unexplained drop in speed for STC mobile on the 23rd August. We have included the STC Fixed Broadband to show that the problem only affected STC Mobile customers. Despite this 50% drop from STC the overall trend during Hajj was a gradual increase in download speed.

STC mobile download speeds are more than 50% faster than either Mobily or Zain and this shows that investment in infrastructure yields positive results and benefits to the end user.

The following graph compares how the average daily median speeds of each of the providers changed before, during and after Hajj. The average shows a remarkable increase throughout Hajj and into the following days. Zain’s speeds after Hajj are faster than those from before while Mobily has returned to before Hajj speeds.

Whatever improvements and changes were made to the Telco infrastructure during Mecca the results of the download speeds show that it was a huge success.

Internet speed map of Mecca

Using mobile device GPS data we were able to map internet speeds in Mecca to a high geographic precision. Collected data were normalized and color-coded so that the fastest areas are in red and slowest in dark blue. The outskirts of Mecca which are not colored are out of scope for this study.

 

Mobily

As can be observed the fastest areas for Mobily are not in the center which can be attributed to increased demand from higher concentration of people.

 

Zain

The Zain speed map is slightly darker and corresponds with slightly slower internet speeds than Mobily. Yet the centre is faring quite well in comparison with Mobily.

 

STC

The STC internet speed map looks comparatively much better than Mobily and Zain and proves that internet speeds are well distributed across whole of Mecca.

The internet quality around Great Mosque is better illustrated using more detailed heat map where you can see individual measurements (which are also color coded like on previous maps). The area around the mosque has very good speeds also for Zain, which indicates Zain did not underestimate the capacity needed in the center.

Mobily	Zain

Conclusion

The 2 million pilgrims arriving in Mecca in 2018 provided a huge challenge to ensure that the quality of service that visitors and locals expect can be delivered and maintained. We have seen how the demand doubled between 2016 and 2017 and this increase was sure to continue in 2018.

The Saudi Arabia Initiative and the efforts and investments of the major mobile operators has ensured that the quality of the service has not only be sustained but improved. This improvement has continued at least for the few days after Hajj (we have no data beyond this). We don’t know how much of the improvement will be permanent but, with a similar commitment in 2019, we can be confident that Hajj will continue to be a Telco success.

Looking further forward we can see that the Saudi Vision 2030 has ambitious plans that should sustain this for the foreseeable future.

In the recent past we have seen a massive development of online streaming services, where Netflix is one of the leading brands in this new market. Netflix has built its own CDN (Netflix Open Connect) to support its worldwide expansion. This resulted in a rapid growth of bandwidth consumption from a considerable number of users, intensifying year after year together with Netflix’s popularity. Netflix has undergone a massive structural transformation in the way it delivers content. Parting from a monolithic application design with some external CDN support to building their own CDN around the world. Currently Netflix Open Connect has 233 server locations in all 6 continents. Their endpoints are primarily located among IXPs and within some ISPs as well. A model which reminds us of Google Global Cache, by installing cachés close to the last mile to deliver specific services.

ISPs have reacted differently across the globe, resulting in some heated discussions about traffic shaping, throttling and service differentiation from ISPs, which rose considerable criticism from defenders of net neutrality and consumers alike. Two years after our previous insight into this topic, we decided to find out what is happening today, if any ISPs are showing signs of throttling Netflix. We found that the situation has improved noticeably.

We setup an experiment which runs from thousands of Speedchecker probes around the world Netflix’s SpeedTest (fast.com) and right after that our own SpeedTest using Akamai endpoints. We compared the results of both tests using our SpeedTest with Akamai as reference and found out which ISPs show noticeable differences when connecting to Netflix. Due to Netflix’s high bandwith consumption and rapidly growing popularity, adapting to such changes might pose a challenge for some ISPs.

After running the experiment for 24 hours, we found that the performance differences between Fast.com and our reference endpoints in Akamai are equivalent, which fortunately tells us that the general rule seems to be not to throttle Netflix.

We can also observe that the situation still changes notably between countries, with Italy showing the worst performance among the countries where our measurements ran.

In the following table, we can see the ISPs in which we measured the top 35 highest median speeds.

[embeddoc url=”http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ISPs-1.xlsx” download=”no” viewer=”microsoft”]

After investigating ISPs in the USA only, we we able to rank their top 10 providers as follows comparing off-peak and peak traffic hours.

We couldn’t detect further major ISPs showing signs of Netflix throttling in the countries we studied. In the cases of CenturyLink, Charter Communications and possibly Time Warner Cable, we can observe a clear disadvantage of Netflix during peak hours.

In conclusion, we have seen the situation of Netflix evolve in positive terms for the consumer. We can see from our test results that the global tendency is to respect net neutrality. There are still ISPs worldwide which haven’t joined Netflix OpenConnect CDN yet and therefore they cannot profit from its traffic delivery benefits. Others simply slow down altogether during peak hours which reveals difficulties at coping with high traffic demand. So far this year, Netflix global launch seems to have gone peacefully and without any major incidents. The market has made its share of pressure to the industry, pushing them to develop high performance infrastructure for the end consumer, while clearing the path for other applications high in bandwidth consumption to enter the market with lower technical and legal barriers.

This year the IETF meeting in its 96th edition took place in the vibrating city of Berlin. We didn’t want to miss out on this important gathering and decided to contribute to one of their workshops on network measurement: nmrg.

We presented a study that was made in cooperation with LACNIC Labs, where the Latin America and Caribbean region was measured using Speedchecker ProbeAPI during one year, making possible to map the region in terms of connectivity. This allowed us to identify clusters of countries that were better connected between them than to the rest of the region. A definition for connectivity had to be defined in such a way that permitted to draw interesting and useful conclusions about the situation in the LAC region.

The video of our presentation at IETF96 can be found here, our presentation starts at minute 43:00. The original blog post by Agustín Formoso from LACNIC Labs can be found here.

The study was received with high interest by both the chairs and audience at the workshop, spawning interesting discussions during and after the session. We are happy to be able to participate and discuss our measurement experiences with the IETF/IRTF community. We collected valuable suggestions and comments which will surely help us point not only our measurement techniques in the right direction, but also develop our products and regional presence in a way that favors coverage and scientific precision.

The IETF 96 meeting has been a very nice experience, allowing us to get in touch and meet personally important actors of this worldwide community as well as keeping ourselves up to date with relevant decisions, norms and standards that are currently being discussed.