{"id":41,"date":"2016-07-01T23:56:38","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T20:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thoughtsbywiza.wordpress.com\/2016\/07\/01\/whos-the-fastest-of-them-all-airtel-malawi-vs-tnm-malawi-3g-internet-speed-test\/"},"modified":"2023-11-23T00:24:18","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T22:24:18","slug":"whos-the-fastest-of-them-all-airtel-malawi-vs-tnm-malawi-3g-internet-speed-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/whos-the-fastest-of-them-all-airtel-malawi-vs-tnm-malawi-3g-internet-speed-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\u2019s the Fastest of Them All? Airtel Malawi vs TNM Malawi (3G Internet Speed Test)"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 5<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span><p>So, tonight, I decided to benchmark my mobile phone connections.<\/p>\n<p>From all the media and advertising, it would appear that both Airtel Malawi <strong>and<\/strong> TNM Malawi claim to have the fastest mobile Internet in Malawi.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s obvious that at least one of these claims must be false, and I just wanted to find out the truth.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>To conduct this benchmark, I used two smartphones. One Sony Xperia Z (C6603 with: a modem capable of HSPA+ (3G or \u201cH+\u201d) with a speed of 42.2\/5.76 Mbps or LTE (4G) Cat3 100\/50 Mbps) and one Sony Xperia Z5 Compact (E5823 with: a modem capable of HSPA+ (3G or \u201cH+\u201d) 42.2\/5.76 Mbps and LTE (4G) Cat6 300\/50 Mbps).<\/p>\n<p>Before I continue, I should state a few important things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Both of these devices have the same 3G modem, so in as far as 3G internet is concerned, it\u2019s pretty much the same device.<\/li>\n<li>Technically speaking, these tests were conducted on a 3.9G network as both Airtel and TNM offer HSPA+ speeds. TNM just launched a 4G (LTE) network, but despite multiple attempts and buying a new SIM card, I was unable to get it working on either one of my devices. My devices worked with Access Communications\u2019 4G (LTE) network, so someone should fix something at TNM.<\/li>\n<li>If you want to know the difference between 3G, 3.5G, 3.75G, 3.9G and 4G, just click <a href=\"http:\/\/sayys365.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/what-is-375g.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ok, so testing conditions:<\/p>\n<p>I figured the best time to run these benchmarks would be late in the evening on a weekday. I ran both tests at approximately 21:30hrs on Friday, 1st July 2016 (CAT).<\/p>\n<p>At the time of benchmarking, I made sure to have good signal strength as I\u2019m fortunate enough to live very close to a cell tower (-70<em>dbm<\/em> \/ 12<em>asu<\/em> on average. This is equivalent to \u201c5 bars of network\u201d).<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Ookla Vanilla SpeedTest<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>I ran three tests on each provider using the Ookla Speedtest App to get the first result. It is worth noting that both Airtel and TNM have Ookla Speedtest servers in Lilongwe so I believe it was a pretty fair match. I tested each provider on their own Ookla server. Below, the average results:<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1OrcQEAZGazeYxAfVhSXH6g.png\" data-width=\"752\" data-height=\"452\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Airtel Malawi vs TNM Malawi Ookla SpeedTest.net Results (Android)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure class=\"wp-caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1YYUFPtxgt18UO7XEr4MS0w.png\" data-width=\"752\" data-height=\"452\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Airtel Malawi vs TNM Malawi Ookla SpeedTest.net Results (Android)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Practically speaking, Airtel and TNM were about the same in terms of download speed, but Airtel\u2019s upload speed is <strong>absolutely terrible<\/strong>. It\u2019s completely unacceptable that we should be getting less than 1mpbs of upload speed on a SpeedTest to a server that they\u2019re running.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, do better guys.<\/p>\n<p>TNM\u2019s download speed was better by about 2Mbps so that\u2019s another win for them, and their ping response time was much lower than Airtel\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TNM won on all 3 metrics in this test.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Ookla\u2019s fancy SpeedTest app is all well and good, but what does it mean for real world usage? I figured the \u201claboratory style\u201d speed test may not represent the reality of what it\u2019s like to actually <strong>use<\/strong> either one of these providers, so I ran some real world tests as well.<\/p>\n<h4>YouTube SpeedTest<\/h4>\n<p>A quick and easy way to test internet speed is to measure how long it takes to load a YouTube video. I didn\u2019t feel like spending the data to load a whole video, but I measured how long it took to start streaming a 720p video (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qskqM9O0FC0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this one<\/a>, in case you\u2019re curious) and that\u2019s when things got a little interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Airtel was by far the better performer here, starting a butter-smooth HD video stream after only 4.02 seconds of waiting time. TNM on the other hand, didn\u2019t even start the stream at all. Maybe I bought the wrong bundle or something? (I bought a 100MB Smart Bundle I think\u200a\u2014\u200aThe lady at the shop said it was the general purpose one, but couldn\u2019t get video to load).<\/p>\n<p>TNM may need to simplify their data\/bundle products, because I have a friggin\u2019 BSc in Information Systems Tech (with a concentration in telecommunications and networks, which I passed with honours by the way) and I still don\u2019t understand what\u2019s going on with these bundles, man.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Airtel won on this metric.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h4>File Download SpeedTest<\/h4>\n<p>Perplexed at my mixed results, I decided to conduct one last test. A good ol\u2019 file download speed test. Again, wanting to save on precious data, I used Think Broadband\u2019s handy 5MB ZIP download (again, available <a href=\"http:\/\/ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com\/5MB.zip\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>, for the curious).<\/p>\n<p>To iron out 3rd party traffic interference, I had only Google Chrome version 51.0.2704.103 (64-bit) running on a fully-updated 2015 Apple MacBook Pro (OSX El Capitan, 2.9Ghz Core i5, 8GB 1867MHz LPDDR3 RAM, 500GB Solid State Flash Drive). I further used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.obdev.at\/products\/littlesnitch\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Little Snitch<\/a> to disable all Internet traffic except from Google Chrome and this is what I found:<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/1yWK29OfWj22kv8pLePEKGg.png\" data-width=\"752\" data-height=\"452\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Airtel Malawi vs TNM Malawi 5MB File Download Time\u00a0Test<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Again, Airtel just blowing TNM out of the water here with an incredible 7.5 seconds vs TNM\u2019s 28.9 seconds to download the same 5MB file from the same server. Airtel\u2019s speed effectively translates to <strong>682.66 kB\/s <\/strong>while TNM\u2019s effective speed was <strong>177.16 kB\/s <\/strong>(Look who can do math\u00a0:).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Airtel Malawi is the clear winner here as it was in the previous test.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At this point in time, I got too lazy to run more tests and figured that Airtel\u2019s Internet is currently better than TNM\u2019s, in as far as 3G is concerned. Though TNM\u2019s Internet is pretty great too. Can\u2019t really complain about either, though, it would have been lovely to test TNM\u2019s 4G, but it just doesn\u2019t seem to agree with either one of my phones.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, these results should be taken with a <strong>HUGE GRAIN OF SALT <\/strong>because there are many, many, many, many, many factors that can affect the speed of the connection between you and your favourite Internet service at any given time, especially on mobile. I could run this test again tomorrow and get wildly different results because of things like network congestion, cached content, noise and attenuation, packet loss (nothing to do with crisps unfortunately) and a whole other list of fancy words I learned\u00a0in\u00a0network\u00a0school. The point is, these results aren\u2019t definitive. But if someone has a few hundred thousand Kwacha to spare, I could easily take a day or two to run laboratory standard network tests on both providers to answer the age-old question that plagues thousands of Malawians everyday:<\/p>\n<p>Who\u2019s got the fastest mobile Internet?<\/p>\n<p>(*Patiently awaits defamation lawsuit*)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 5<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>So, tonight, I decided to benchmark my mobile phone connections. From all the media and advertising, it would appear that both Airtel Malawi and TNM Malawi claim to have the fastest mobile Internet in Malawi. It\u2019s obvious that at least one of these claims must be false, and I just wanted to find out the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4,17,19,25,27],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-airtel","tag-malawi","tag-mobile","tag-tech","tag-tnm"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}