State of LTE varies greatly around the world says OpenSignal

Our three biggest mobile telcos get average speeds of around 20-25Mbps, putting us into strong contention with the rest of the world and with generally good LTE coverage.

Something to keep in mind is that the ten countries with better LTE coverage than the USA, excluding Japan, are smaller than California.

OpenSignal’s most recent report aboutthe state of global LTE coverage and download speeds tells some familiar stories. Korea is also home to the fastest single LTE operator in the world, Olleh, with an average download speed of 30Mbps.

Australia is positioned 14th in global 4G coverage, at an average 74 percent.

OpenSignal’s metric for coverage is the proportion of time users have an LTE signal, or “Time Coverage”.

Interestingly, the overall score for the United States, as well as most of the individual carrier scores, actually represented a slight decrease from the second quarter of 2015.

The single network with the best coverage in the entire world is LGT in South Korea with 99.6% coverage, presumably that is coverage of the nation’s population since the entire country was said to be 97% covered.

According to the report, lagging speeds in the United States are a result of both early LTE adoption that led to a large number of subscribers competing for a limited resource and slow upgrades. New Zealand, Singapore and Romania are the top 3 countries to offer the best download speeds with 36Mbps, 33Mbps and 30Mbps respectively, but the United States drops to the No. 55 spot out of all 68 countries listed.

Provided by The VergeThe top portion of OpenSignal’s chart showing LTE download speeds.

Why? According to OpenSignal, some early adopter LTE countries are “suffering from their own success”. The fastest LTE speed to be found on a network is StarHub in Singapore with 38 Mbps speeds. OpenSignal notes that while part of the reason the U.S.is slipping is due to its huge base of subscribers, it hasn’t matched the capacity that countries like South Korea and Singapore have put into their networks.

The US was one of the first countries with commercial LTE service when Verizon Wireless launched its network in late 2010.

OpenSignal collects data on cellular performance through a free app that mobile subscribers can use to measure the speed they’re getting and find faster networks.