Telus has the overall edge among the Big Three
MOBILE ANALYTICS COMPANY Opensignal this morning released its latest study of the Canadian wireless market, work which reveals some hard numbers to support the claims often made by Canadian carriers about how their networks are fast and world-class.
Let’s start with download speeds. “Opensignal recorded big surges in download speeds for all of Canada's major operators,” reads its report. “Telus and Bell both boosted their Download Speed Experience scores beyond 50 Mbps, and all three operators now provide our users with 4G Download Speeds faster than 50 Mbps. And these rapid increases in speed show few signs of abating, meaning we'll likely see the 60 Mbps barrier in Download Speed Experience broken in the next year.”
“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,” reads the report. “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.”
The report studied quite a large sample size of over 173,000 devices between April 1 and June 29, 2019, taking more than 438 million measurements.
Telus now makes LTE coverage available to more than 90% of its customers, followed by Bell at 88.6% and Rogers at 87.9%, and all of this means video performance offered by the carriers is getting stronger, too, says the report. “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,” reads the report.
When it comes to regional performance, Opensignal’s data shows the growing strength of Freedom Mobile’s network in Calgary, for example, and Vidéotron’s in Montreal (see images below – click to enlarge).
“In Calgary, Montreal and Vancouver, at least one operator had Excellent Video Experience ratings, which is our highest possible rank for video quality, and in nearly every other case all of the major operators landed Very Good ratings. Vidéotron earned a Very Good rating in Montreal as well, while Freedom Mobile earned Good or better ratings in its markets in all but one case. Getting a fast download connection or high-quality Video Experience in Canada's largest cities is certainly not a problem,” says the report.
