Canada places 12th in mobile data speeds out of 87 countries, OpenSignal says

Canadians may not be satisfied with the price they pay for wireless services, but new numbers out Wednesday suggest that they get some of the fastest data speeds in the world.

According to wireless-mapping company OpenSignal, Canadian mobile users have access to the 12th-fastest data speeds in the world in a ranking of 87 countries.

OpenSignal crowdsources its data from more than a million people worldwide who have downloaded its app.

It tracks network quality whether they are inside or outside, in a city or rural area, so their numbers "represent performance the way users experience it," the company says.

Wireless providers like to describe their network speeds under ideal conditions — for example, what users could experience if they had an unobstructed view of a cell tower, in an area where nobody else was also using it. But OpenSignal's numbers document speeds as they are clocked in the real world.

For this report, the company analyzed more than 19 billion data points from more than a million devices in 87 countries.

In the aggregate, it found that mobile users in South Korea enjoy the fastest mobile speeds in the world, at 37.54 megabits per second. Norway, Singapore and Hungary all topped 30 megabits, a cut-off that OpenSignal calls "a high bar to achieve, as it requires not only having powerful LTE networks but also extremely high access to those 4G connections."

Canada fared comparatively well, too, with an aggregate score of 20.26 megabits per second. That's an improvement from last year, and places Canada in a group of just 13 countries above the 20-megabit threshold. All other countries in that group are either in Europe, Asia or Oceania.

Canadian mobile users, on the whole, get mobile speeds that are generally much faster than those in the U.S., which clocked in at 12.48 megabits per second.

Aggregate Canadian speeds were more than twice as fast as those seen in South Africa, Mexico and Brazil, for example.

OpenSignal's numbers aggregate totals found in various places across the country, but many companies claim mobile speeds exponentially higher than what OpenSignal found, depending on your location and level of service.

Bell Mobility, for example, advertises speeds for users in downtown Toronto of up to 335 megabits per second.

Rogers, meanwhile, says some users can expect maximum theoretical download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second on the Rogers LTE network.

And Telus says it offers up to 225 megabits per second on its top-of-the-line LTE plan.

While OpenSignal didn't attempt to track data on prices, reams of other data suggest that Canada's comparatively swift wireless networks come with higher price tags.

A CRTC report last year found that Canadians pay the second-highest prices among a list of eight developed nations for data plans under 2 GB per month and up to 5 GB per month.

While Canadian prices are cheaper than those in the U.S., they are higher than those in the UK, Germany, Australia, France, Italy and Japan.

Another report from telecom research firm tefficient found that Canadians pay some of the highest fees for wireless data in the world, which causes them to use less of it.

And the most recently commissioned Wall Report on Canadian telecom prices from 2015 found a similar conclusion — that on the whole Canadian wireless prices are higher than they are in other developed markets, except in certain provinces with more competition.

OpenSignal's numbers, however, make it clear that Canadians are at least getting better value for their money in terms of network speeds.

Well-served by Wi-Fi too

OpenSignal also tracked the percentage of time that users were connected to Wi-Fi, which many mobile users use to supplement both downloading speeds and also keep costs low by not racking up large overages on their cellular plans.

"Many countries with fast overall connections still made good use of Wi-Fi," OpenSignal found, and Canada was no exception, with the company tabulating that Canadian mobile users are, on the whole, able to connect to a Wi-Fi network 60.65 per cent of the time.

The Netherlands led the way in that category, with users in that country spending almost 69 per cent of their time with access to a Wi-Fi network.

"The Netherlands has some of the fastest cellular connections in the world but that in no way steered users away from Wi-Fi," OpenSignal said.

Almost half the countries on the list saw Wi-Fi ratios above 50 per cent, meaning mobile devices are connected to Wi-Fi more than half the time. The exception was in many developing African and Asian countries, which is likely indicative of their less robust broadband infrastructure, the company said.

"In a large part of the world our users are spending as much time connected to Wi-Fi networks as they are to cellular networks," OpenSignal said. "Rather than acting as a mere supplement to 4G networks, Wi-Fi remains as important a technology as any cellular system in mobile communications."