Data use optimised as Bahrain achieves 99% mobile coverage

Network coverage of telecom operators in Bahrain reaches 99% of the population in outdoor use of mobile services whether through calls or data usage on both 3G and 4G handsets, as per the latest report by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The TRA recently published its mobile quality of service report for the year 2017, surveying the most popular mobile services in Bahrain including web browsing, popular apps use, video playback, data transfer, SMS and voice calls, under a variety of testing conditions, such as indoor and outdoor use.

As per the report, all operators have improved their performance levels for data use, particularly since the activation of 4G in 2014.

The average speed for a download session, which was 8.4 Mb/s in 2011, is now 37.3Mb/s, and 73.6% of files now reportedly download with a speed exceeding 10Mb/s.

Uploading a file is also faster than the previous years, as the average speed was approximately 1Mb/s with 3G, while now it is reportedly over 23Mb/s. The average time to upload a 50MB file is now less than 30 seconds, which is particularly relevant given the widespread use of social networking applications.

The use of internet has been evaluated by browsing popular websites in Bahrain (Google, Facebook, YouTube etc.). The average time to load a webpage is around three seconds, and 96% of web pages reportedly downloaded within 10 seconds.

On Facebook, the available speed for uploading is around 10MB/s, which means that an average volume of 18Mb of data is transferred within 30 seconds.

“The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the Kingdom of Bahrain prepared this report in the continued interest of the promotion and improvement of quality of service,” said Mohamed Alnoaimi, TRA Director of Technical Operations.

“TRA is the only authority in the GCC to publish results of field tests measurements using protocols built to be as close as possible to user experience,” he added