In their second State of Mobile report focusing on Australia, Open Signal has shown that our mobile broadband market is one of the most mature in the world with strong showings from all three major Australian carriers.
The Open Signal State of Mobile Networks: Australia report was generated based on more than 200 million measurements taken from almost 11 thousand devices running the Open Signal app between July 1st and September 1st this year.
The state of the Australian mobile market is relatively strong here in Australia with awards for fastest speeds, availability and more being shared between all three major carriers. Breakdowns of the numbers show that there are slight differences between the two even when a tie has been awarded, but it’s getting close.
Telstra and Vodafone tied for the fastest 4G score, though the breakdown shows that Telstra is still slightly ahead of Vodafone, with a 37.8 Mbps download speed, while Vodafone hit 35.2 Mbps. OpenSignal saw Optus still had a decent showing with an average download speed of 30.2 Mbps. This result shows Vodafone’s continued investment in their network is paying off.
Though Telstra and Vodafone had the fastest download speeds, Optus did have a small win with the least amount of latency on their 4G network.
The availability of 4G in Australia shows that all three carriers drew, though this score is skewed by the urbanised nature of the Australian population. Open Signal acknowledge that if the population taking part in the trials lived outside of the major capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane Telstra would likely be a winner.
Despite all this, all three carriers were able to offer their customers a 4G signal Over this reporting 85% of the time. Vodafone offered the best by a tiny margin at 85.9%, while Optus was close behind at 85.4% of the time, finally Telstra customers were able to access 4G signal 85.1% of the time.
The breakdown of availability, download speed and latency when shown in each region shows a more clearly defined picture for the various capitals and which carrier ‘wins’ in each category.
While 4G is definitely the focus for most mobile consumers these days, 3G services are still quite active. Telstra surprisingly lost to Optus and Vodafone in terms of download speeds in this category with Optus 3G customers averaging 6.5 Mbps and Vodafone customers averaging 6.3Mbps. Telstra wasn’t too far behind though with 5.7 Mbps downloads on their 3G network.
Open Signal sees the 3G networks of each carriers prime for cannibalisation as the carriers look towards a 5G future, with the expectation that they will begin to sunset services on 3G in order to provide better, faster services on 4G and then 5G in the future.
There’s a lot of interesting data in the Open Signal report, but overall it shows that we have it pretty good here in terms of a quality 3G/4G network with all carriers making moves to implement 5G.
As with any data, your mileage may vary depending on where you are, so your experience may differ. If you would like your experience included in next years report, download the Open Signal app from Google Play or the Apple app store today.
