OpenSignal has released its State of LTE report tracking the changes over the last three months to not only global LTE deployments from a coverage perspective, but also speed performance.
The Asia-Pacific region is clearly in the lead on all counts, which likely isn’t a surprise to anyone. The specific countries might offer some surprises though. New Zealand offers the fastest end-user speeds with 36 Mbps downloads. Starhub in Singapore has the fastest overall network able to provide up to 38 Mbps downloads. As far as deployment, LGT in South Korea wins with 99.6% territory coverage, and the average user being served 97% of the time by LTE is also in South Korea.
Coverage doesn’t necessarily equal speed in all locations. The top 10 countries for coverage are as follows:
- South Korea
- Japan
- Hong Kong
- Kuwait
- Singapore
- Uruguay
- Kazakhstan
- Netherlands
- Bahrain
- United States
Europe is noticeably underrepresented on this list. When you look at the download speeds, the situation changes a bit:
- New Zealand
- Singapore
- Romania
- South Korea
- Denmark
- Hungary
- Austria
- United Arab Emirates
- Greece
- Australia
Now you see five of the top 10 coming from within the European Union. The top speed on this list, as mentioned above, is New Zealand with 36 Mpbs download and Australia comes in at 21 Mpbs. The most shocking item to me was that when it comes to speed, the U.S. drops all the way to 50th place with a download speed of only 9 Mbps. Another surprising statistic is Sweden; one of the earliest adopters of LTE, Sweden does not appear in the top 10 for either coverage or download speed.
The following graph shows the spread of different speeds and as you can see the definition of an “LTE experience” still varies greatly around the globe.
Global LTE Speeds. Source: OpenSignal, 2015
I’ve only touched on some of the key highlights of the report. It can be downloaded here in its entirety.
It’s clear the leaders in LTE continue to change. Longevity in the space and coverage don’t seem to necessarily correlate to end-user performance. It will be interesting to see how the LTE leaders stack up when “5G” begins to roll out.
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Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
