Canada ranks 12th in the world for overall data speed, says Open Signal

OpenSignal has released its latest Global State of Mobile Networks report, providing a comprehensive snapshot of the overall global wireless landscape.

The report demonstrates that LTE steadily continues to displace 3G and that Wi-Fi remains an important feature for smartphone users, especially in Canada.

“Since our last global mobile networks report, we’ve seen average overall mobile data speeds increase steadily in countries worldwide. But we’re also seeing continued reliance on Wi-Fi networks as supplemental means of accessing the mobile internet. We may be in the 4G age, but, as always, consumers are using a multitude of wireless technologies,” states OpenSignal.

Overall Speed

In terms of overall speed of data networks, Canada has improved marginally from 18.31Mbps in the last report to 20.26Mbps. 87 different countries were included in this section of the report’s findings, and even in an age of rapid wireless improvement, the results remain extremely broad.

Canada is the only country in the west to reach 20Mbps, giving the nation a ranking of 12th on the list of the world’s fastest national networks. This is up two places from its previous 14th position slot.

South Korea maintains its first place position, though the country’s average mobile data connection speed dropped slightly since the last report was issued, to 37.54Mbps. Other countries that crossed the 30Mbps threshold include Norway, Hungary and Singapore.

Canada lands over 20 positions above its southern neighbour, the United States, which averages a much lower mobile connection speed of 12.48 Mbps.  The lowest average speed recorded among the countries on this list is Costa Rica at 2.69 Mbps.

Time on Wi-Fi

Unlike the last Global State of Mobile Networks report, this recent edition also focuses on the time spent on Wi-Fi by smartphone users around the world. 96 countries were included in this section of the report and of these nations, 38 had time on Wi-Fi scores of 50 percent or greater.

Canada takes a massive leap from the last section to place fourth in the Wi-Fi component, behind the Netherlands, China and Germany. According to the report, Canadians spend approximately 60.65 percent of their time on mobile networks connected to Wi-Fi.

This represents a 10 percent higher rate than the United States, whose residents spend just over half their time on mobile networks connected to Wi-Fi. The lowest recorded time on Wi-Fi of the countries included on this list was Nigeria, whose residents spend just over 11 percent of their time connected to Wi-Fi networks.

For this report 19,257,135,678 data points were collected from 1,095,667 users of OpenSignal’s speed testing app between November 1st, 2016 and January 31st, 2017.

Image Credit: Razor512

Source: Global State of Mobile Networks