It’s always pretty interesting to see which countries have the fastest mobile networks. South Korea almost always appears on top, and that’s likely due to the influence that tech giants like Samsung and LG have on the country. OpenSignal today released their report on the global state of mobile networks. Now before we jump into the report and see the results, it’s important to talk about the sample size and how the report was compiled. The data sample size here is 12,356,994,498, and the user sample size was 822,556 with all the data coming between May 1st and July 23rd of this year. The information was crowdsourced from users using their Android or iOS app.
When it came to 3G and 4G availability (remember some emerging markets still rely heavily on 3G, like Jamaica, India and a few others), South Korea came out on top. Followed by Japan, Israel, Australia and Singapore rounding out the top 5. While India, Ukraine and Guyana were in the bottom three. When it came to the overall speed, South Korea ran away with the win here, at 41.34Mbps on average. While the second place, Singapore, averaged speeds of 31.19Mbps. The United States was in the middle of the pack at about 12Mbps. Ethiopia, Costa Rica and Afghanistan came in last place, coming in at under 3Mbps.
OpenSignal also tested the amount of time that users spent on WiFi and as you’d expect, the more developed countries spent the most time on WiFi. This is likely due to data caps on mobile networks, as well as WiFi being a bit more abundant than in emerging markets like Ethiopia who came in last place. The Netherlands spend the most time on WiFi, about 70% of their time. The US, is surprisingly in the middle of the pack again, at about 53%.
So there you have it, the state of mobile networks for 2016. Some pretty surprising numbers coming in here, but it does also show that some of the larger mobile markets (China, India, and the US, who are the top three respectively) don’t have the best mobile networks or the most coverage.
