While carriers and networks are scrambling to talk about “5G”, the rest of the world is still trying to grasp onto 4G / LTE, some way faster than others. In the latest results conducted by Open Signal, with the sample period in the first quarter of 2017 and testing out more than 500,000 devices, 4G availability continues to spread globally, reaching new niches in countries that are trying to catch up and pushing the boundaries of speed and availability in some cases and some countries.
The results show that some countries in East Asia, specifically South Korea and Japan, 4G is actually as ubiquitous as 2G and 3G signals. In the majority of the countries they tested, users were able to connect to LTE more than 60% of the time, which is a pretty high percentage already. Those who already have fast LTE speeds keep pushing it and now, there are 15 countries that are averaging at an excess of 30 Mbps.
As expected, South Korea is consistently at the top of the table in terms of 4G availability and second highest in terms of speed (Singapore is tops in that category). Other countries that also did well in both categories are Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, and Singapore. Meanwhile, India has made tremendous leaps in terms of 4G LTE accessibility, thanks to carrier Jio’s nationwide launch just last September which saw them get 100 million LTE subscribers.
In terms of availability, which they define as “the percentage of time OpenSignal users were able to latch onto an LTE signal”, Japan and South Korea are the only countries able to bring LTE more than 90% of the time, but others in the top 10 are also catching up, including the US and Taiwan and Hungary which made their debut. In terms of speeds, while the high performing countries continue improving, the middle and bottom ones haven’t done much improvement. Let’s see if anything changes in six months again.
SOURCE: Open Signal
