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Canada electoral results: How the mobile experience changes across party and location

On the back of the recent 2019 federal election in Canada, Opensignal analyzed our smartphone users’ experience based on the electoral results and found that users on average have a better mobile experience in the ridings/districts where the Liberal Party won its seats.

Our users in the electoral districts where the Liberal Party won their seats (see the results on the map here), on average, had the best experience across the four metrics we analyzed, though our users in the districts where the NDP won had a very close experience. Our smartphone users in the districts where the Conservative Party led the results, on average, had a worse mobile experience across our users, though they had a tied Download Speed Experience and 4G Availability with our users in the ridings where the Bloc Québécois claimed its seats.

Canada users have a better mobile experience in the ridings where the Liberal Party won

Opensignal users’ 4G Availability and Video Experience varied by less than 10% across the ridings where the four major political won their seats. However, we measured a marked difference in both of our speed metrics. Our users in the Conservative and Bloc Québécois districts had a 16.9% and 20.2% lower Download Speed Experience than our users in the Liberal ridings, though the gap was even wider in Upload Speed Experience, where they saw on average 7.6 Mbps and 8.8 Mbps upload speeds — 30.2% and 19.2% lower than the 10.9 Mbps our users on average enjoyed in the Liberal districts.

The reason for these differences is fairly straightforward. Canada’s election reflected an urban-rural divide, with urban areas more likely to vote for left/progressive parties and rural areas more likely to vote for right/conservative parties. Opensignal recently analyzed Canada’s mobile experience across urban and rural areas and found that users experienced the largest divide in our speed metrics, with large urban zones seeing up to 2.6 times faster 4G Download Speed than rural areas.

Our data confirms these results: as the Liberal Party is more likely to win its seats in highly-populated urban areas, our users in those ridings are also more likely to have a better mobile experience.