London, U.K.-based OpenSignal has released its latest State of LTE report, providing a comprehensive look at the state of LTE availability and network speeds across the globe.
Since its last State of LTE report, which was published in January, average LTE speeds in Canada jumped from 26.55Mbps to 30.58Mbps, representing a 13.9 percent increase. LTE availability, meanwhile, increased by 5.68 percentage points to 81.10 percent — instead of measuring LTE availability geographically, OpenSignal examines how consistently users of its mobile speed testing app can access an LTE network in their country.
For a greater perspective on these numbers, Canada was put against 74 other countries and ranked 13th in terms of LTE speeds and 19th in terms of LTE availability. The average LTE connection speed in Canada is more than twice as fast as the average in the United States. It’s also significantly higher than the global average of 16.2Mbps (notably, the global average decreased compared to OpenSignal’s previous LTE report).
However, it pales in comparison to the countries at the top of the list like Singapore, South Korea, Hungary and Norway where wireless subscribers can enjoy LTE speeds that exceed a blazing fast 40Mbps.
In terms of availability, Canada was beaten by countries like Qatar, Estonia and a surging India. In the case of the latter, a national Indian carrier called Jio greatly helped the cause of the subcontinent. This past September, the carrier launched its LTE network and began giving away internet service for free, with more than 100 million subscribers flocking to the brand since.
Canada’s availability percentage speaks to the difficult geographic conditions that make even higher LTE penetration a difficult proposition here. With LTE service mostly not available in hard to reach rural areas, it’s likely Canada will fall behind in OpenSignal’s availability index.
To compile this latest report, OpenSignal collected 19,556,514,365 data points from 558,260 devices during the three-month period between January 1st, 2017 and March 31st, 2017.
Source: OpenSignal
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