download speed

Business users were the first adopters of mobile phones in the 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, over the last decade the typical mobile user has been a consumer with the arrival of the modern smartphone. But mobile services have remained extremely important to business and more and more businesses have relied on mobile service to operate, especially during the many challenges of the last year.

Many different kinds of 5G service are now available. Most carriers have launched an early version of 5G technology that continues to rely on the availability of 4G service and access to the legacy 4G core network. This is called non-standalone access (NSA). But for most of the planned benefits of 5G — beyond speed alone — carriers need to offer standalone access (SA) where a smartphone connects exclusively to 5G signals and uses a modern 5G core network.

5G is still near the beginning of its decade-long era. No mobile technology stands still, so we must continue to analyze the real-world experience and see how it changes and improves. Here we analyze Opensignal’s global 5G data from real mobile users to identify the leading countries and quantify their 5G mobile experience.

Opensignal’s data shows that short-term variations in average mobile data consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with variations in our users’ average Download Speed Experience across multiple countries. In part, this is because other ways of improving capacity such as additional wireless spectrum, could not be brought into use quickly in most countries to help with changed mobile usage.

Key points

• The real-world broadband experience is highly dependent on the location of users’ homes, and users care about the experience where they live, and not nationally. Users’ speeds are higher on almost every ISP in urban areas, followed by suburban and rural areas.