The city of Chihuahua has quite the namesake. It lends its name not only to the famous breed of miniature dog known for its outsized bark but also to the popular semi-soft cheese that originates from the surrounding dairyland. According to Opensignal's latest analysis of the 20 of the largest cities in Mexico, though, Chihuahua could just as well be synonymous with fast mobile broadband speeds. The city topped our chart in Download Speed Experience and was among the fastest in Upload Speed Experience.
In fact, Mexico's north fared well in our speed comparison, as three of the top five cities in our download speed analysis were in that region: Chihuahua, Mexicali and Monterrey. But we found that speeds in all 20 cities were quite good. Nine of them had average download speeds of 20 Mbps or faster, and every single city beat out Mexico's national Download Speed Experience average of 14.9 Mbps, as measured in our recent State of Mobile Network Experience report.
The same can be said for upload. All but one city had Upload Speed Experience scores faster than the national average of 7 Mbps. Ironically, the only city that didn't meet that benchmark was the biggest Mexican city of them all, the capital. Chihuahua and Guadalajara both scored over 10 Mbps in this metric, indicating very fast upload connections, not just for Mexico but the world.
Given operators tend to focus their infrastructure and capacity upgrades in urban areas, it's not surprising to see Mexico's big cities outperforming the national averages in speed. We would also expect to see the same in 4G Availability, where dense cell deployments make it easier for urban users to find LTE signals. We weren't disappointed in that expectation.
Mexico has a national 4G Availability of 79.8%, according to our recent global report, and all 20 cities cleared that bar easily. Again the north took top honors in this metric. Mexicali was the only city to clear 90% in 4G Availability in our measurements, and six of the seven cities that surpassed 88% 4G Availability were in the higher latitudes: Juaréz, Saltillo, Monterrey, Chihuahua and Hermosillo.
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