The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has released its quarter 1 of 2012 broadband analysis report on the quality of fixed 2Mbps Broadband residential services offered by licensed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
“TRA’s analysis report shows improvements in the service performance. The observed download average across the industry increased to 1.50 Mbps and this represents 75% of the advertised speed by the ISPs. The upload speed also increased dramatically for ADSL packages, resulting in the industry’s upload average reaching 0.58 Mbps from 0.42 Mbps recorded over previous quarters,” TRA’s Consumer Affairs and Media Director, Ghada Al Qassab, said.
“Via this regular report TRA aims to enhance the awareness of consumers in Bahrain not only of the tariffs and the features of the services available in the market, but also of the actual observed performance and quality of these services,” Al Qassab added.
“Through this report, TRA is aiming to provide consumers with comparative data relating to the observed quality of service achieved by ISPs to allow consumers to make informed decisions when choosing a service provider. It is not feasible for TRA to monitor all the available packages from all ISPs and therefore the choice has been made to focus on the 2 Mbps packages for ADSL, Fiber and WiMax Services from 2Connect, Batelco, Etisalcom, Kalaam, Lightspeed, NueTel, Menatelecom, and Zain,” Mohammed Tayeb Mahmood, TRA’s Technical and Operations Director said.
The following chart presents the observed typical average download speed day variation based on measurements taken every hour for each audited service during the period of Q1 2012, from 00:00:00 on 1 January 2012 to 24:00:00 on 31 March 2012.