Digicel Samoa has won the Ookla Speedtest Award 2021 to confirm its status as the provider of the country’s fastest mobile network internet speed and coverage.

The mobile phone company’s winning of the award was announced by the Digicel Samoa C.E.O. Seiuli Deepak Khanna through video link on Wednesday morning, as part of a press conference the company convened at its headquarters at the SNPF Plaza.

The announcement by Seiuli was witnessed by the management and staff of the company, including the Chief Operations Officer, Harpreet Bhulla and the Chief Technical Officer, Derrick Rasmussen.

The Ookla Speedtest Awards are held in high esteem by the telecommunications industry and is regarded as the Oscar awards of the mobile network industry. 

Seiuli said Ookla is the highest body in the world with certifiers and bio-networks across all countries and Digicel Samoa's 2021 award confirms the return on investment that the company has made in its network.

“Last year we invested quite a bit on our network, I say about $10 to 12 million just to upgrade our network,” he said. 

“This year again, we are doing the same planning in advance taking into account that the pandemic is bound to arrive in the country and that means we will be experiencing high volumes of network usage in the country.”

On the company getting the Ookla Speedtest Award, the C.E.O. Seiuli said it was a proud moment for him as it is the pinnacle in the telecommunications industry. 

Looking back at the work that the company has done over the past 15 to 16 months, Mr Harpreet said they received consumer feedback, which gave them insights on what they needed to do to improve the network quality and experience for customers.

“Some part of the network can be on the tower, some part can be on the microwave link or the fibre link that brings back data from the tower to our data centres,” he said.

“So we had all those by investing more funds in the network by analysing consumer experience and by investing more into understanding consumer needs.”

With another award in the bag for the telecommunications company, Mr. Harpreet said Digicel will keep investing, analysing and listening to consumer feedback, to enable them to constantly provide the fastest mobile network for consumers in the country. 

Throwing more light on the significance of the award, Mr Rasmussen said Ookla is an independent company and they provide a platform which is the Ookla speedtest. 

He said when a consumer downloads the Ookla speedtest app, all that information is captured by Ookla and they take that and look at the consumer’s geographic location, where they are based and check out the speeds of the mobile network provider that the consumer is using.

According to Mr. Rasmussen, the speedtest measures how quick your phone will talk to the nearest server and receive it back. The speedtest itself also has an upload and download speed which are very critical as most people download stuff from the internet, he added.