Bell takes top speed spot
NEW YORK — Bell is the fastest wireless carrier in Canada, according to PCMag’s annual Fastest Mobile Networks Canada 2020 report, released today.
Bell is regaining the fastest mobile network title this year, after Telus topped the list for the last three years.
To test the country’s mobile networks, PCMag’s Canada-wide testers drove through 20 cities, some as large as the Greater Toronto Area and as small as Sudbury, Ont., and Drummondville, Que., as well as rural areas in parts of Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan. The tests were conducted from September 14 to October 15.
Overall, PCMag awarded Bell as the winner in 12 cities, while Telus won four, and Rogers and SaskTel each won one. Two cities in Ontario — Toronto and Waterloo — were ties between Bell and Telus.
Some of the highlights from the report include the following:
- Montreal was the fastest major metro area in Canada, with a mean download speed of 209.5 Mbps and a mean upload speed of 34.7 Mbps.
- The small city of North Bay, Ont., was even faster than Montreal, with mean download speeds of 304.2 Mbps and mean upload speeds of 30.6 Mbps.
- Toronto had the highest peak speeds recorded in all of Canada.
- Ottawa has the slowest metropolitan city speeds recorded in Canada.
- Mobile networks in rural areas such as Northern Ontario, Southern Quebec and Saskatchewan have distinctly lower speeds than urban areas do.
“The real news this year is that Canadian networks are offering a lot more for subscribers’ money, and holding up under the strain of much more capacious service plans. While rates are still generally higher than in the US, the arrival of unlimited plans in Canada hasn’t resulted in the networks slowing down — they’re still, on average, twice as fast as the mobile networks in America,” reads the report.
When it comes to 5G wireless, there’s not much there, yet, adds the report. “5G is making a difference, we found; it’s just not a generational one. The carriers are essentially adding another 4G-like channel and calling it 5G. Since that channel is restricted only to 5G phones, people with those 5G phones are going to get better performance. But there’s nothing about Canadian 5G, right now, that the carriers couldn’t be doing with 4G if they wanted to,” it says.
“This isn’t the fault of the carriers. For Canada to truly move into the 5G era, the government needs to act faster. Unlike in Asia and Europe, the CRTC hasn’t made any 5G-appropriate airwaves available to Canadian wireless carriers. 5G makes a real difference when it’s applied to large, standalone blocks of spectrum, and the CRTC delayed its auction of 5G-friendly airwaves from December 2020 to June 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The pandemic forced PC Mag to test a bit differently this year, it adds, which forced it to test in different cities than in the past. It hired freelance testers to drive around their own cities, in their own cars, shipping the phones from place to place. “Because there’s a huge gap in wireless performance between urban and rural Canada, we made sure three of our drivers (in Saskatchewan, Quebec, and northern Ontario) covered some rural areas,” says PCMag.
“We used phones that each carrier said best represented the performance of their new 5G networks. For Bell and Telus, that was the LG V60. For Rogers, we used the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. For other carriers, we tested with the Samsung Galaxy S20+.”
PCMag uses software developed for it by testing expert Ookla.
For the full report and commentary on test cities, please click here.
