Canada

Canada has reached a major milestone in its 4G development. Telus has become the first operator to reach the 90% 4G Availability mark — and just barely. Our 4G users were able to access a Telus 4G connection 90.1% of the time, which secured the operator our 4G Availability award for the second report in a row. Though Telus may have the honor of being first to attain 90% in our measurements, its win in this metric wasn't a given. For the last few reports, Bell, Rogers and Telus have come within a few percentage points of 90%, each making incremental gains every six months but never quite crossing the line.

Incremental gains in 4G Availability are what we expect in Canada from now on. The biggest growth in 4G Availability since our last report was only 1.1 percentage points, recorded on Rogers’ networks. The era of big growth in 4G access appears to be over as operators are now turning their attention to 5G, and we're already seeing evidence that's exactly where their attention is now focused. Canada recently completed its 600 MHz auction, releasing new mobile broadband airwaves to Rogers, Telus and several regional providers. Those 600 MHz licenses would normally be ideal for boosting 4G Availability and coverage, but both Rogers and Telus have earmarked those frequencies for their future 5G rollouts.

Telus and Bell were battling it out for Opensignal's Video Experience award in our last report, but in this data collection period an outright leader has emerged. Telus won our Video Experience award with a score of 69.8 in our 100-point scale, putting it more than a point ahead of Bell. Telus and Bell maintained their Very Good ratings (65-75), which means that video exhibited short load times and few interruptions during playback, even at high resolutions. What's more, Video Experience is improving on all operators. Bell and Telus are now both closing in on a score of 70 in our measurements, while Rogers is less than a point shy of joining its rivals in Very-Good ratings territory.

As you might expect, Canada's powerful 4G connections are the driving force behind these high Video Experience scores. When we looked at 4G Video Experience alone, Bell and Telus were both less than 3 points shy of Excellent ratings (75-100), which is our highest possible measure of mobile Video Experience. But those two operators also did quite well in 3G Video Experience, earning Fair ratings (40-55) when we looked at video streamed over HSPA connections only.

While growth in 4G Availability is stalling, the same can't be said for speed. Download speeds in Canada continue to ramp up and show no signs of slowing down even as the Canadian mobile industry takes its first steps toward 5G. Both Bell and Telus boosted their Download Speed Experience scores above 50 Mbps, and those gains were by no means small. Our Bell and Telus users' average overall download speeds both increased 8 Mbps in the last six months to reach 51.9 Mbps and 57 Mbps respectively. Rogers may have again come in last place, but its Download Speed Experience was nonetheless exceptional. Our Rogers users were able to access average downstream connection speeds of 41.7 Mbps, representing an increase of more than 5 Mbps since our last report.

These download speeds put Canadian operators among the top tier globally in this metric, but what's most intriguing is how Canada continues to improve its 4G Download Speeds, considering operators are already laying the groundwork for the 5G launches. Telus' average 4G Download Speed is now above 60 Mbps and Bell is about to meet the same milestone. In a recent analysis of 4G peak speeds in Canada, we found the peak 4G speeds our users experienced consistently surpassed 180 Mbps nationally, while in Montreal and Toronto, Telus users routinely encountered 4G peak speeds close to 300 Mbps.

At the same time, Bell, Telus, Rogers have all conducted 5G network trials and are now in the process of selecting vendors for their upcoming 5G rollouts. That said, Canadian operators aren't in as big of a hurry to launch 5G as many of their global peers. While the first commercial 5G services have already gone live in the U.S. and South Korea, Canada likely won't see commercial 5G service until 2021 — late 2020 at the earliest. However, Canada's operators seem committed to pushing 4G to the end of its evolutionary path.

While we recorded huge boosts in Download Speed Experience across the operators, we saw practically no change in their Upload Speed Experience scores. That's a good indication that any new LTE Advanced network upgrades are mainly affecting the downlink rather than the uplink portion of the network. Our users, however, had access to excellent upload speeds across all three operators' networks. Telus and Rogers drew for the award with Upload Speed Experience scores just below 10 Mbps.

When we break down upload speed by technology we find that 4G connections are responsible for the high Upload Speed Experience scores we measured. None of our users on the three operators' networks averaged 3G Upload Speeds faster than 1 Mbps, but when connected to the 4G network, they consistently experienced upload speeds faster than 10 Mbps.

Telus once again netted our Latency Experience award with an average overall response time of 41 milliseconds. Latency is an increasingly important metric as it impacts the customer experience in many subtle ways. Lower latency connections mean less lag time when using real-time communication apps, faster reaction speeds during multiplayer gaming sessions and generally faster loading videos and webpages.

Canadian operators in general had good Latency Experience scores, with their users’ latencies all below 50ms, and when we look at 4G Latency alone, we see both Telus and Bell's scores dropping below 40ms. No Canadian operator yet, however, is approaching the 30ms bar, which is where we typically see Latency Experience scores for the most responsive 4G networks. This is one area in which 5G will eventually provide a major boost as the technology's streamlined architecture promises to push latency levels down to the single digits.