How do Singapore's regions stack up in 4G?

When OpenSignal publishes a new national report, we often follow up with a metro-level analysis of the country in question, seeing how the big cities within compare in our metrics. We recently published our first State of Mobile Networks: Singapore report, which means it's the island nation's turn for a regional breakdown. But how do we compare cities in a country comprised of one large city? OpenSignal decided to try something new: we divided the Singapore map into five sectors corresponding roughly to its five urban-planning regions and examined how each fared overall in our 4G download speed and 4G availability metrics.

For this analysis we looked at the same 90-day test period as our Singapore report to identify the fastest sector and the sector with the highest level of LTE access. You would think the Central region would emerge at the top of our charts, given it contains the Downtown Core and the key commercial areas of the country. Well, you would be half right. Central had the highest 4G availability in our measurements, but in 4G download speed, two other sectors beat it. The mostly residential Northeast had the fastest score, followed by the industrial East. Both had 4G download averages just shy of 50 Mbps.

To be fair, comparing Singapore's regions in speed is a bit like ranking a world-renowned artist's masterpieces. All five regions of Singapore had extraordinarily fast 4G connections, which is why the tiny country consistently ranks No.1 in our 4G download table in our State of LTE report. Even the slowest of the five regions, the North with a 4G download score of 41.5 Mbps, was more than twice as fast as the global average of 16.9 Mbps.

In terms of 4G availability, not much separated the highest-ranking sector from the lowest-ranking sector. Central had the best availability score of 87.7%, meaning our users were able to find an LTE signal in the region nearly 88% of the time. But the Northeast and East regions were less than a percentage point away from matching Central's score. The North, which is home to much of the city's undeveloped green spaces, was at the bottom of our LTE reach rankings in Singapore, but nonetheless its 4G availability score of 85.5% would be the envy of many major cities around the world.

Be sure to check out our recent inaugural national report for Singapore to see how the individual operators compared in our metrics. And if you're a 4G user in Singapore, tell us how your own experience matches up against our regional analysis. In which sector do you find the fastest 4G connections? What about the best signal access? Let us know in the comments section below.