Royal Group’s Cellcard reclaimed the no.1 spot in the Ookla® Speedtest Awards™ and was recognised as Cambodia’s Fastest Mobile Network for 2022, and the best network in H1 2023.
The Cambodian telco attributed its success to several network enhancement initiatives rolled out as part of a business turnaround strategy, spearheaded by its new leadership. They actually collected the award at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona in February 2023, when the Chairman of the Royal Group of Companies, Neak Oknha Kith Meng, and Cellcard’s Chief Executive Officer, Simon Perkins were presented the award.
The 2023 Speedtest Award™ win, demonstrates its commitment “to delivering long-term value to our customers, centred around our renewed focus on network quality and performance, innovation and service excellence," added Perkins. As we reported previously, Cellcard was also recognised as the best mobile network in the Kingdom in the Ookla H1 (Q1-Q2) 2023 report. The Ookla® Speedtest Awards™ report showed that Cellcard achieved speeds of 36.91 Mbps - ahead of Smart Axiata at 31.76, and Metfone Viettel at 21.44. Simon Perkins, Chief Executive Officer of Cellcard said of the award, “We are delighted to again win the Speedtest Award™ for 2023. The win is a testament to the continued efforts we are putting behind our network initiatives. The Cellcard teams, together with our network partner, Huawei, have been working hard every day to enhance our customer's connectivity experience, and this award is a great acknowledgement of their efforts."
Cellcard says that together with network partner Huawei, they started its network enhancement initiative in 2022, "centred on providing cost-optimised agile solutions, supported by Cellcard’s engineering expertise." In 2023, they have continued to densify coverage in residential and CBD (central business district) areas of Cambodia which has led to improved indoor coverage, and coverage in more than 10 provinces. They added, "With Huawei’s MIMO Solutions (Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output) - a technology used in both 4G and 5G networks, improvements on the Cellcard network’s spectral efficiency, data rates, coverage range and capacity were made possible.
In addition, further network capacity enhancement on multiple frequency bands were carried out with Huawei’s 4T6S solutions, which included next-generation ultra-wideband multi-beam antennas and high-power dual-band 4T4R RRUs." Simon Perkins continued, “While we continue to innovate in other parts of the business to create unique value for our customers, real differentiation can be made on the network side. It’s the basics you need to get right. Don’t worry about the frills and niceties, they’re second priority. Deliver the basics, deliver them well."
Ookla will release updated data on country and city rankings and updated Ookla Market Reports for Q3 2023 in October. Parts of this article were based on a supplied press release.
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