Performance Evaluation of Mobile Broadband Cellular Networks in Pakistan

Pakistan is a rapidly growing cellular market with a growth rate of 185 % in number of mobile broadband users during 2014-16 and over 15.75 million mobile broadband users [4]. The exponential increase in broadband penetration demands investigation of mobile broadband performance from an end user perspective. To the best of our knowledge, no extensive study exists to document mobile broadband services experience in Pakistan except a recent Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) QoS report [8]. This deficiency of evidence is distressing because benchmarking Mobile Wireless broadband performance is primarily important for customers in Pakistan as well as for mobile operators. This will help both mobile operators and regulators to improve and maintain an acceptable level of quality of service. Thus, we conducted a pilot study to benchmark and analyze quality of user experience of mobile wireless users by deployment of an Android application for mobile customers to measure performance of each cellular broadband provider (Ufone, Telenor, Zong, Warid and Mobilink) in Pakistan. We analyzed performance attained at the end user device, quality of service that users are getting and identified performance bottlenecks and possible reasons. On basis of these results, we provide insights to improve mobile broadband internet services (3G and LTE) in Pakistan. Among our list of mobile operators, performance of Zong is the best in 3G networks followed by Mobilink. We consider throughput and latency as core characterizing parameters. Zong 3G has higher sustained throughput, better latency to international servers but in other factors like average signal strength, jitter and last mile latency, Mobilink 3G is superior than Zong 3G. Zong 4G performs better in overall results whereas Warid performs better in last mile latency and jitter. Our results reinforce Pakistan Telecommunication Authority(PTA), QoS survey of 3G/4G for the year 2015.