LONDON, UK – With the 5G era on the horizon, all three of Canada's national mobile operators averaged impressive download speeds across their mobile broadband networks, but Telus has taken the lead for 4G availability, says OpenSignal in its most recent Mobile Networks Experience: Canada report.
The wireless mapping coverage company examined close to 1.16 billion measurements collected from 161,672 total devices between October 1 and December 29, 2018 in its update on Canada, released Thursday.
According to the report, Bell and Telus were tied in 4G availability rankings throughout 2018, not surprising given their long-standing infrastructure sharing deal that effectively gives them the same LTE footprint. But in the latest test period, Telus pushed past Bell with a 4G availability score of 89.3% compared to Bell's 88.1%. Rogers scored 86.8%.
Telus was also first in download speeds with an average score of 49 Mbps, according to OpenSignal’s measurements. But Canada's other two nationwide operators were not far behind, with Bell clocked at 43.9 Mbps and Rogers averaging downloads of 36.3 Mbps, all impressive scores by global standards.
In the upload speed experience category, Telus and Rogers tied for the lead, both with an average overall upload speed of just under 10 Mbps (9.9 Mbps and 9.6 Mbps, respectively). Bell’s average overall upload speed was measured at 8.9 Mbps.
Canada also excelled in video quality, a key measure of the consumer mobile experience. All three national operators had high marks in OpenSignal’s new video experience metric, but Bell and Telus had video experience scores greater than 65 (66.9 and 67.6, respectively), which merits a ‘Very Good’ rating on the 0-100 scale. Scores between 65 and 75 indicates consistently good quality video streams with little lag before video begins playing and few interruptions during playback — even at higher resolutions. Rogers earned a score of 61.8 in video quality.
“A Very Good score is a hard target to hit. In OpenSignal's recent report on overall video experience on a country level, Very Good was the highest rating awarded in our 69-country analysis, and only 11 countries were able to hit that mark,” continues the report. Canada's impressive Download Speed Experience scores were likely a contributor to its superior Video Experience, but speed alone isn't the determining factor in video quality. Especially in countries where speeds are already high, factors like latency, 4G Availability and consistency of speed have a big bearing on Video Experience scores.”
