The Straits Times writes that Singapore’s new fourth telco TPG Telecom has vowed to improve its network services ahead of its upcoming commercial launch later this year, after a recent study placed it far behind established rivals Singtel, StarHub and M1, in terms of download speeds and network coverage. The paper cites TPG general manager Richard Tan as saying that the would-be newcomer is ‘still in its trial phase and has not enabled all network features or completed overall network optimisation,’ adding that results will improve as it gets nearer to commercial launch.
Singapore’s new fourth cellco claims to have signed up close to 200,000 users for its twelve-month free trial, which kicked off in December 2018 and is ‘completely free for the first twelve months and includes unlimited data, unlimited local mobile-to-mobile calls, 20 local SMS messages and 20 minutes of outgoing calls to local fixed lines each month’. However, a study published this month by mobile analytics firm Opensignal found that its average network download speed from February to May was 26.1Mbps, significantly slower than Singtel (42.5Mbps), StarHub (39.5Mbps) and M1 (36.1Mbps). Further, an average upload speed of 5.1Mbps also compared unfavourably with M1 at 13.4Mbps, Singtel (12.7Mbps) and StarHub (12.4Mbps), and TPG users spent 4.5% of the time without a signal – considerably worse than the range of 1.0%-1.6% for the established trio.