Telecommunication: Why did speed test indicator decline in Oman?

Muscat: In a telephone interview with "Ma’a Al Shabiba" show, Engineer Nasser bin Mohammad Al Jabri, Director of Service Quality and Comprehensive Service Department at the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said that it is conducting many field surveys in various wilayats of the Sultanate of Oman, using specialised measurement tools and approved methodologies that simulate the user's experience, with the aim of improving communication services provided to users.

These surveys are among the regulatory tools that the Authority follows in monitoring the telecommunications services provided by the providers and verifying the efficiency of services to meet the requirements of users. One of these tools from which the Authority benefits in verifying the quality of services is the “speed test” indicator.

Engineer Nasser Al Jabri explained that the “speed test” indicator is an application of Ocula company. The “speed test” application is a platform through which mobile and fixed broadband speeds are measured. Any country can enter this platform whenever the speed measurements in that country exceed 300 for the speeds inside it. Oman’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has been in this indicator for many years. But for it, the “speed test” indicator is a secondary indicator, and not a real indicator of the speeds in the Sultanate. This is because the number of users of the “speed test” application is very small in the Sultanate. The number of mobile phone users in the Sultanate is approximately 6,600,000 users, while users of measurements of internet speed through the “speed test” application range from 1,200 to 3,000 users in a quarter of a year.

Engineer Nasser Al-Jabri explained that the “speed test” application is available in various mobile phone stores, whether Google Play or App Store. Any user can download the application and through it, at any moment, can check the network he is connected to at that moment and in any geographical area inside or outside the Sultanate, in order to know the download speeds at that point. On the other hand, the application collects all the readings of the various tests from different users and sorts those existing metrics and shows their levels according to each country.

He added that the number of users inside the Sultanate who measured the download speed using “speed test” is very small compared to the number of subscribers to the various telecommunications services in the Sultanate. Therefore, the total Application indicators for Internet speeds in the Sultanate will not be of high accuracy.