How fast is 4G mobile broadband in your area?
Analysis & Visualisation by Loh Li Wei
Singapore leads the world in smartphone usage, with at least nine in ten people using one last year. Increasingly, most people do without computers at home, preferring to use smartphones and tablets due to their ease of use and portability.
With smartphones becoming such an important part of our lives, any drop in mobile broadband speeds can be a disruption to our daily routines.
The MyConnection SG initiative
To identify places in need of improvement, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) launched the MyConnection SG app in October 2014. The app, available on Android and iOS devices, collects crowdsourced data from volunteers from across the island, which is then aggregated to give a picture of how good (or bad) mobile broadband speeds are.
Our map shows the median speeds in different areas in Singapore on 4G networks, based on the 1,582,521 anonymised readings collected by IDA last year from July 1 to Dec 31.
We used a hexagonal grid because hexagons are the closest shape that can be tessellated. You can read more on why this is better than a square grid here.
To summarise the findings, we grouped the readings into the five planning regions created by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Each region has a population size of more than 500,000 people and provide a mix of residential, commercial, business and recreational areas.
From the bar chart below, we can see that the median speeds between the five regions are quite similar, with the East slightly ahead. The 10th and 90th percentile speeds also show the same pattern.
Telco comparison
It is also possible to make a rough comparison between the telcos by region. Using a similar hexagonal grid as the map above, we shade each area based on which telco offers the highest median speed there.
You can compare telco performance at the places you’re interested in by typing your address into the Search box.
Areas without a hexagon are those where no readings were submitted by volunteers via the MyConnection SG app.*
Conclusion
As we can see from the telco map, there is a fairly random distribution of telco performance in most areas.
We can also see that there are many places where there are still insufficient readings. IDA plans to continue monitoring mobile broadband speeds in Singapore with the MyConnection SG app. As with any crowdsourcing initiative, the more people using the app, the more data IDA can collect from users of each telco, and from different places in Singapore.
Want to do your part to improve mobile broadband speeds here? Download the MyConnection SG app from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store now!
Any feedback or ideas? Drop us a message on social media, or email us at feedback@data.gov.sg.
* Note: Our median figures may differ from that published in IDA’s March 2016 MyConnection SG report due to differences in methodology. In our analysis, readings by the app may be tagged to more than one location if the user is on the move, while location-matching was not used in IDA’s report.
