Australia

Australia's already impressive 4G Availability continues to climb higher. In Opensignal's last report, Optus became the first Australian operator to reach the 90% 4G Availability milestone, and in this analysis we have a second, Vodafone. Telstra is on the verge of the same accomplishment with a score of 89.4%.

We typically see 4G Availability scores of 90% in countries with very mature and very extensive LTE rollouts, for which Australia definitely qualifies. Australia's achievement is that much more impressive, though, as it is vast in size. Reaching 90% 4G Availability in a city-state like Singapore or a densely populated, compact country like South Korea is an easier feat. What's more, Australian operators are continuing to grow their 4G Availability scores, though we're starting to see more incremental increases as Australia prepares for its 5G launches.

One of the most important applications on smartphones today is video, and when it comes to delivering streamed video to the handset, Australia aced our tests. All three operators earned Very Good scores (65-75) in our 100-point Video Experience scale, which indicates little wait time before video begins rendering and only occasional stalling during playback even at higher resolutions. Very Good is only one grade shy of our best possible rating, Excellent, which is very difficult to hit under current 4G technologies.

Only a handful of individual operators globally have achieved Excellent Video Experience scores, and only when we limit our analysis to 4G connections. Though all of Australia's operators were very close in this metric, with less than 1.5 points separating all three, Telstra and Vodafone ultimately shared our Video Experience award as both had a slight edge over Optus.

When we break out 4G Video Experience in Australia, we see that Telstra was closest to broaching the Excellent line with a score of 72.8. All three operators, however, had 4G Video Experience scores over 70. And though providing high quality video over 3G connections is difficult, all three operators garnered Fair ratings in 3G Video Experience. Even when limited to slower HSPA networks, Australian users often have a good enough connection to be able to view video with at least a Fair experience.

Australia has built some of the world's most powerful LTE networks, which is clearly evident in our download metrics. Users of all three national operators had Download Speed Experience scores greater than 30 Mbps, but one operator, Telstra managed to exceed the 40 Mbps mark, putting it among an elite class of operators globally. Needless to say, Telstra's score of 41.1 Mbps was a lock for our Download Speed Experience award.

While Australia's 3G services are by no means slow, its 4G services are the main determining factor in Download Speed Experience scores. When we look at 4G Download Speeds exclusively, we find Telstra again ahead of the pack with an average download of 46.1 Mbps. Optus also broke the 40 Mbps barrier in 4G Download Speed, while Vodafone averaged downstream connections of 36.5 Mbps.

Telstra won our Upload Speed Experience award with a score of 9.3 Mbps, but all three operators’ users had relatively fast upload connections in our measurements, all above 7 Mbps. When we break down 3G versus 4G connections, we find the upload speeds we measured on Australia's HSPA networks limited to around 1 Mbps, but 4G Download Speeds for all three operators were greater than 8 Mbps.

Upload Speed Experience in Australia was about 25% of Download Speed Experience, which, while not unusual globally, does highlight the growing gap between downstream and upstream capabilities. As smartphones become more powerful, they're being heavily relied on for more upstream-intensive applications like video chat and video sharing. As more mobile consumers move toward content creation rather than mere content consumption, we expect operators will need to begin investing more in upload capacity to ensure they maintain a good mobile experience.

Latency is one of the least understood measures of a network's capabilities. It's a gauge of a network's response time, and a low-latency connection can mean less lag time in real-time communications apps, faster loading webpages and videos and a better mobile gaming experience. All three of Australia's operators’ users enjoyed low Latency Experience scores, though two stood out. Both Vodafone and Optus had overall latencies below 35 milliseconds, drawing for our Latency Experience award.

In our breakdown of latency by technology, we find both Optus and Vodafone creeping close to the 30ms milestone for 4G Latency. That's a mark few operators have passed in our measurements, and we likely won't see huge improvements beyond 30ms until the next generation of mobile networks get off the ground. When full-fledged 5G networks appear — using both 5G new radio access networks and cores — latency is expected to fall closer to 1ms.