LONDON, U.K. — Rural mobile subscribers in Canada enjoy some of the fastest download speeds in the world, says the latest report from mobile analytics company Opensignal.
Released today, The state of rural Canada’s Mobile Network Experience – May 2020 report also found rural mobile subscribers have access to 4G networks close to 90% of the time — a percentage more commonly seen by mobile users in more populated areas, Opensignal says.
For this report, Opensignal analyzed the data of users on Canada’s three largest mobile operators — Telus, Bell Mobility and Rogers. According to its analysis, rural users on the networks of Telus, Bell and Rogers have download speeds that surpass those experienced by users in most countries.
In its analysis, Opensignal also compared the mobile network experience of rural users to urban users in small, medium and large population centres (PCs) in Canada.
Comparing download speed experience during the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2019, rural users on Telus and Bell’s wireless networks saw dramatic jumps in their download speeds over the past year, according to the company. Telus’ rural users saw their download speeds increase by 70.7% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to Q1 2019, and rural users on Bell’s network saw download speeds increase by 53.2% during the same time period, Opensignal says.
Opensignal’s analysis was based on data collected between January 1 and March 30, 2020, just as Canada was starting to take measures to combat the spread of Covid-19. Most of the analysis took place before business and school closures, so Canadian users who were impacted in mid-March may have had a much better mobile network experience than they would have had a year ago, Opensignal notes.
According to the report, rural Canadian users have better mobile download speeds than users in five of the seven G7 countries in the world. In its global State of the Mobile Network Experience 2020 report, Opensignal found users in Germany have average download speeds of 28.7 Mbps, users in France have download speeds of 28.6 Mbps, U.S. users have download speeds of 26.7 Mbps, Italian users have download speeds of 24.3 Mbps and U.K. users have download speeds of just 22.9 Mbps. In comparison, speeds for rural Canadian users on each of the three networks — Telus, Bell and Rogers — are between 20% and 110% faster than the overall speeds of users in those five G7 countries. Among the G7, only Japanese users experienced a higher speed than some rural Canadians, with an overall download speed of 49.3 Mbps.
These results stand in contrast to another report recently filed with the CRTC by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which found rural speeds in Canada to be much lower, although that report was not just examining mobile wireless networks. (Watch for a story coming soon from Cartt.ca on speed reports as there are many questions we have asked and are getting answers on, from a number of parties.)
In terms of 4G availability improvements over the past year, rural users on Rogers’ network saw the biggest improvement with a score of 89.2% in the first quarter of 2020, an eight-percentage-point increase from a year ago when Rogers had the lowest 4G availability of all three operators with a score if 81.2%, notes Opensignal. Telus and Bell also achieved higher 4G availability scores over the past year. Despite the improvements, Opensignal users in rural Canada still have significantly lower 4G availability compared to users in the most populated urban areas of Canada, Opensignal says.
The global report includes data gleaned from 43,338,654 mobile devices on which 87,524,176,592 tests were done during the three-month period.
