Wireless speeds are improving even in regions that have traditionally been slower to adopt new technologies. The countries with the top three LTE download speeds were New Zealand (36 Mbps), Singapore (33 Mbps) and Romania (30 Mbps). With 140 countries globally now deploying the network technology, eight with LTE scheduled and virtually every nation with an upgrade plan in place, the world is growing closer to widespread adoption of LTE.
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Meanwhile, some countries which introduced LTE relatively early on (including the United States, Japan, Sweden, and Germany) are starting to see their data speeds suffer by comparison.
Why? According to OpenSignal, some early adopter LTE countries are “suffering from their own success”. Countries with consumers that have money to spend and want speed and performance for mobile networks tend to have much better speeds and coverage than those where the population is poorer. Specifically, more subscribers are competing for the same network infrastructure. OpenSignal notes that while part of the reason the U.S.is slipping is due to its huge base of subscribers, it hasn’t matched the capacity that countries like South Korea and Singapore have put into their networks. South Korea is at 98 percent, though it has less ground to cover. South Korea has almost doubled its LTE speeds in the last couple of years and significant investments in networks are also having an impact in Singapore, Denmark, Austria and Hungary.
Something to keep in mind is that the ten countries with better LTE coverage than the USA, excluding Japan, are smaller than California.
Australia held down equal ninth spot alongside Taiwan and Greece for average download speed in Q2, at 16Mbps. “In this report, 50 countries make the cut”.
To be sure, 10 Megabits per second-the average US LTE download speed, according to OpenSignal-is still useful. Verizon was at 84 percent time coverage, followed closely by AT&T at 81 percent, but Sprint hit just 64 percent coverage.
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OpenSignal has officially released its latest report on the state of global LTE coverage and download speeds for the third quarter of 2015. “Iliad’s Free Mobile may be challenging the French powers-that-be on price, but its LTE time coverage ranked lowest in Europe at 26%”, OpenSignal said. In total, OpenSignal sampled 325,221 users of its Android and iOS apps to create its analysis.
