Open Signal has today unleashed their state of LTE report, showing the availability and speed of LTE connections worldwide. While Australia is ranking pretty highly, it isn’t all good news with the availability not as good as it could be.
Australia is quite an early adopter of new technology such as LTE with 4G networks starting to appear here as early as 2013. This love for faster data speeds has seen Australia make the top 10 for speed in the Open Signal report. The report is based on over 19 billion tests conducted on over half a million devices around the world. The report is based purely on 4G LTE connections, not the HSPA “Faux-G” that some carriers try to fob off as a true LTE connection.
Australia ranked at number nine in the report with an average LTE speed of 33.76Mbps, though this is two places behind our New Zealand brothers who ranked at number seven with 34.91Mbps. Topping the global speed list for LTE is Singapore with an average speed of 45.62Mbps.
While they topped the scores in speeds, when it came to availability with access to LTE Singapore dropped way out of the top 10 with just access to LTE only just over 82% of the time. South Korea took the top honours with their users having access to LTE over 96% of the time while also maintaining a 43.46Mbs speed average making them probably the best country to live in for access to and speed of LTE. Australia ranked at 19th on the list with access to LTE over 79% of the time, smashing the Kiwis who only have access to LTE 58% of the time.
Availability of LTE here in Australia is a harder task than most other countries with our unique geography and population distribution making it harder than most countries to provide consistent LTE. Despite that, we have a good showing, now if only our broadband was in the same state.
With 4G signal reaching over 79% of the population and at speeds of above 30Mbps, the eyes of all our carriers appears to have switched firmly to 5G which is expected to begin rolling out in 2020, though testing in limited capacity around Australia is well under way.
Open Signal releases their state of LTE report every six months, and if you’d like your results included you can install the app on your Android or iOS phone to provide more data to them.
