Ookla is the company behind the widely used speedtest.net where users go to diagnose potential network throughput issues and brag to their friends about actually having good internet speeds (although in Australia that’s pretty rare!). The company has just enhanced this further by adding a 5G service map to the service offering.
The map – located at http://www.speedtest.net/ookla-5g-map – has been developed on the quiet, tracking both commercial and limited access 5G networks, to give some context to the scale of operations that are ready for public use:
At time of launch, we’ve identified 303 5G deployments worldwide provided by 20 operators in 294 cities. Australia has 12 of those deployments.
For each location you’ll be able to tap the pin and get further information about the current state of the individual towers including the carrier and current availability of service from that tower.
If you’re keen on staying on top of the developments in the 5G space, you can follow @ookla5gmap on Twitter. The account setup by the Ookla team will be (as the map is) continually updated to ensure that followers are across the changes in the 5G space.
In the blog post, Ookla made specific note that
Telstra and Optus in Australia operate limited availability 5G networks in 12 cities, many of these in the more populated coastal regions.
There is a lot of information to digest here and as an evergreen resource, it will continue to be a useful resource for some time to come in the mobile space. Keep your eyes out because you may well find that 5G is availble near you in the very near future.
That’s awesome – Ookla are definitely awesome, I rely on them and take speedtest for granted much like gravity!