State of Mobile Networks: Canada (January 2017)

When we last looked at the mobile operators of Canada, OpenSignal found a mobile market with very high performance 3G and 4G networks. A year later, we see Canada continuing down that path of excellence. Not only do our tests reveal mobile data speeds and signal access in the top tier of the world's operators but also a highly competitive market when it comes to mobile network performance. It's not just one standout operator performing well in our metrics; it's all of the big 3.

Since publishing our last Canada report in 2016, OpenSignal has made some adjustments to both the way we collect data from our smartphone apps and the methodology we use to parse that data. The update allows us to make more measurements, examine new types of network metrics and hone the precision of the measurements we've always collected, helping us isolate the typical consumer mobile experience more effectively (for more details, see this blog post). The changes haven't affected our overall rankings of networks in Canada or around the world, but for sake of analytical rigor we aren't making any direct comparisons between results collected from the two different methodologies.

For this report we collected 289 million measurements from 15,272 OpenSignal smartphone users to compare the 3G and 4G performance of Bell Mobility, Rogers and Telus. Canada is unique in that it still has many regional operators operating in one or more provinces, but for the purposes of a national report we focused only on the three nationwide providers. Let's start by looking at how accessible those operators' LTE networks are.

A very tight race

In many of our metrics, we found no clear winners given how evenly matched the operators were in our measurements. That closeness was particularly in evidence in 4G availability, which measures the proportion of time our users had access to an LTE connection. Rogers and Telus shared the award for best availability as OpenSignal testers were able to latch on to their LTE networks just over 80% of the time, but Bell was an extremely close third with a 4G availability score of 78.3%.

We saw another close race in LTE speeds. This time Bell and Telus drew for first place in both our 3G and 4G speed rankings. We measured average 4G download speeds on Bell's LTE network at 28.4 Mbps, while Telus tested at 30.5 Mbps. The 3G result was even closer with a little more than 100 kbps separating them. The results were close enough in both speed categories to produce statistical ties. Rogers, however was by no means slow. We clocked its LTE download speed at 27.3 Mbps, though it did trail more in our 3G measurements. Its 3G download average of 4.9 Mbps was more than a megabit slower than the other two operators’ average of 6.2 Mbps. The one speed category where we were able to declare a winner was in overall performance, which measures the typical speed we see across an operator's data networks. Telus's slightly better LTE availability score pushed its overall speed to 24.1 Mbps in our tests, just ahead of its competitors.

It should come as no surprise that Bell and Telus are so evenly matched in speed, considering they share a network. As far as network partnerships go, theirs is quite extensive, not only involving shared towers and radio access infrastructure but also shared spectrum. That said, we wouldn't expect their results to be exactly the same. Both Telus and Bell are traditionally stronger in different regions of the country and in some cases have gone after different subscriber segments. Those different sets of subscribers are reflected in OpenSignal crowdsourced user base and thus reflected in our tests. Also, Bell and Telus may share the radio network, but they maintain different network cores, which can lead to subtle differences in performance, particularly in the final metric we cover: latency.

Latency is a measurement of a network's reaction speed. The lower the latency of a connection the faster web pages will begin rendering and videos will begin playback. Low latency also means less lag time in real-time communications apps. Telus won in both our latency categories. We measured delays of just 43.5 milliseconds on its LTE connections and 73.2ms on its HSPA links.

Small country; big numbers

Canada's major operators may be closely matched with one another, but on the global stage all three surpass the majority of the world's operators. The slowest Canadian 4G network in our tests was still 10 Mbps faster than the global LTE average connection speed of 17.4 Mbps. All three operators have deployed LTE on multiple frequency bands, and all have upgraded their networks to boost connection speeds with new LTE-Advanced technologies.

In our last State of LTE report, Canada ranked in the top 20 in global 4G availability with an average score of 75.4% That number factors in the availability of Canada's myriad regional operators, so the average of 4G availability of Canada's Big 3 is closer to 80%. Compared to its more populous neighbor to the south, the U.S., Canada still lags slightly in LTE availability, but it makes up for it in performance. The typical 4G connection in Canada is 26.6 Mbps, nearly twice that of the typical U.S. connection.