Global State of Mobile Networks (February 2017)

As 4G proliferates across the globe it's having a big impact on the typical connection speeds mobile consumers see on a daily basis. Since our last global mobile networks report, we've seen average overall mobile data speeds increase steadily in countries worldwide. But we're also seeing continued reliance on Wifi networks as supplemental means of accessing the mobile internet. We may be in the 4G age, but, as always, consumers are using a multitude of wireless technologies.

First let's take a look at speed. For our Global State of Mobile Networks report, Opensignal looked not at 4G or 3G speed individually, but rather at the aggregate speed our users experienced across all of a country's mobile data networks. We feel that measurement paints a more holistic picture of the typical mobile data experience as it factors in not only the performance of different types of networks, but the amount of access customers have to each of them.

As you can see from our chart detailing the overall download speeds of 87 different countries the performance range between countries is quite broad, starting at less than 3 Mbps but rising to more than 30 Mbps. The fastest country in our ranking was South Korea, which led our last report as well, with an average download of 37.5 Mbps. Norway, Hungary and Singapore also had overall speed averages higher than 30 Mbps. That's a high bar to achieve, as it requires not only having powerful LTE networks but also extremely high access to those 4G connections.

While we did see South Korea's overall speed score fall since our last report (from 41.3 Mbps), in general we're seeing speeds improve steadily at the top of our list. In our August report, only nine countries had an average overall speed of 20 Mbps or greater. In our latest round of tests, the number of countries sporting 20 Mbps or faster connections has risen to 13. Those top performers have largely remained the same, dominated by South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Australia in the east and a handful of northern and eastern European countries in the west. The only country on another continent to break the 20 Mbps barrier in our tests was Canada.

In the bottom half of the chart, we see a lot of the developing nations, many of which are still in the early stages of their 4G rollouts. Roughly in the middle of our chart sits the U.S., which was one of the first countries to launch LTE and has one of the highest rates of 4G penetration in the world. But U.S. LTE networks are on the slow side, which brings down the country's overall score. In comparison, many western European countries have extremely fast LTE connections, which puts them in the upper third of our rankings. But their relatively low 4G availability keeps them from reaching the upper ranks. Their users are still relying on 3G connections a good portion of the time.

The second metric we looked at was time on Wifi, which translates into the proportion of time our users spent connected to a Wifi access point rather than a cellular network. The range of Wifi use was also quite broad with our Nigerian users spending just over 10% of their time connected to Wifi networks, while in Netherlands Wifi connections accounted for a full two-thirds of our testers' share of connections. Many countries with fast overall connections still made good use of Wifi. For instance, the Netherlands has some of the fastest cellular connections in the world but that in no way steered users away from Wifi. Meanwhile in many developing and African and Asian countries, Wifi use was much less pronounced, which is likely indicative of their less robust broadband infrastructure. There are plenty of outliers that make detecting distinct Wifi usage patterns difficult though.

In general though, we see a high proportion of time spent on Wifi in the majority of the 96 countries we analyzed. Specifically, 38 of those countries had time on Wifi scores of 50% or greater, meaning in a large part of the world our users are spending as much time connected to Wifi networks as they are cellular networks. Rather than acting as a mere supplement to 4G networks, Wifi remains as important a technology as any cellular system in mobile communications.