Ridings with better cell service voted Liberal: Opensignal

On average, people in the ridings where the Liberal Party won seats in the federal election have better smartphone experiences.

The federal election is over now and Canada’s next Prime Minister is Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. 

Analytics firm Opensignal measured its smartphone users’ experience based on the results of the 2019 federal election. It found that people in ridings that voted for Liberal MPs had higher experience across four metrics. This included download speed, upload speed, availability of 4G and video experience.

NDP districts had very similar mobile experiences to Liberal ridings. Conservative and Bloc Québécois ridings, however, tended to have worse mobile experiences.

Opensignal says its users’ 4G availability and video experience varied by less than 10 percent across the ridings where these four parties won seats.

Download and upload speed, on the other hand, had a more significant difference. Conservative and Bloc Québécois users had a 16.9 percent and 20.2 percent lower download speed experience than users in Liberal ridings. The upload speed gap was more extensive, seeing 30.2 percent and 19.2 percent lower speeds respectively.

Opensignal says the reason for the correlation to mobile speeds is because the election results reflected an urban-rural divide. Urban areas were more likely to vote for left-leaning, progressive parties while rural areas tended towards right-leaning, conservative parties.

Comparatively, urban areas tend to significantly better mobile download speeds than rural areas.

To learn more about the results, check out Opensignal for a full breakdown.

Source: Opensignal