The speed of mobile broadband in the U.S. have shown no signs of improvement compared to other countries. The report from OpenSignal studied sixteen countries download speed. Australia took first place with 24.5 Mbps, improving 42%, from 17.3Mbps to 24.5Mbps The U.S was second to last, just ahead of the Philippines (5.3Mbps) with 6.5Mbps.To be more precise, the U.S. finished next to last in 4G (LTE) mobile broadband speed.
LTE stands from Long Term Evolution, AKA 4G. According to OpenSignal “The technical definition of 4G is that it should have data speeds capable of reaching 100Mbp/s while on moving transport and 1Gbp/s when stationary. While LTE is much faster than 3G, it has yet to reach the International Telecoms Union’s (ITU) technical definition of 4G. LTE does represent a generational shift in cellular network speeds, but is labelled ‘evolution’ to show that the process is yet to be fully completed.”
U.S 4G download speed has dropped from an average of 9.6Mbps in the second half of 2012 to 6.5Mbps in 2013. That 30% decline wasn’t the fault of any particular carrier, either, as the report stated that “the USA networks uniformly perform poorly for speed.” However, it was noted that Metro PCS recorded the slowest speed of all eligible networks.”
The downgrade in speed could be the result of additional LTE customers joining every year.
In March of 2012, You can see that there were 11 million LTE subscribers in the U.S. Last year, in March 2013, the number exponentially grew to 49 million subscribers. We should expect telecom providers like Verizon to upgrade their infrastructure, but recent headlines are only showing that they’re feuding with Netflix.
While operators are constantly rolling out to new areas and making improvements to their network, Open Signal stated, “increased users combat these improvements, as increased network load brings down average speeds.” Despite the U.S. performing more poorly this year, they did manage to keep their users connected.
The U.S being ranked 15/16 for their download speed, was able to have their users connected 67% of the time. Even though Brazil was ranked third with a download speed of 21 Mbps, their users were connected to a 4G network 50% of the time.
Australia, the fastest country for download speed, was down in ninth place, connecting their users only 58% of the time.
This study was conducted by OpenSignal. OpenSignal is a company that specializes in wireless coverage mapping. The data came from 6 million of its users who are on 4G networks.