OpenSignal’s State of LTE Report Highlights the Best Countries for 4G Accessibility

OpenSignal has released their State of LTE report for 2016, which gives us a good look at the accessibility of 4G LTE all over the world. The report is a culmination of efforts and analysis of 17 billion measurements collected from half million OpenSignal users.

Starting off with the availability of 4G (time users remain connected to a 4G connection), South Korea leads the pack with 95.7% connectivity to an LTE network, making 4G as geographically ubiquitous as 3G in the country. Seeing that both Samsung and LG are based off of South Korea and are frequently chosen to test drive the latest mobile technology, the high proliferation of 4G services does not surprise us.

While South Korea has the highest prevalence of 4G, the crown for best speeds goes to Singapore (albeit South Korea did compete closely for it). Average download speeds over 4G connections came out to be 45.9 Mbps, the highest average speed in the world. It is very likely that countries in the near future will be able to breach the 50 Mbps average due to continued investment and advancement in the mobile network sector.

Global 4G speeds averaged 17.4 Mbps despite several countries going over 20 Mbps. As this is an average, it is heavily affected by the population numbers of the country. So countries with high speeds but small population are unable to properly offset countries with low speeds and large population, thus bringing down the global average. Further, speeds also do not always equate with consistency and availability, meaning that you can have high 4G speeds but poor proliferation of the network overall.

The surprising number is the speed average for USA, which comes in at 14 Mbps, well below the global speed average. Although speeds in urban areas with high coverage might be well above this number, there are large swatches of land which may not have access to such high speed connections. Similarly, India's speed average is a measly 6.4 Mbps, which surprises me personally as an optimistic figure.

To take a better look at the interactive charts and more data, do check out OpenSignal's Full Report.

What are your thoughts on the LTE Report? Do you think it represents the situation fairly? Are the figures practically relatable to what you experience? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Source: OpenSignal

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