South Korea Leads World in Mobile Download Speeds, U.S. Comes in 30th [Chart]

OpenSignal has released its 'The State of Mobile Experience' report for May 2019.

The report looks at data from January through March 2019. Data from 87 countries was compared across five key award metrics: 4G Availability, Video Experience, Download and Upload Speed Experience, and Latency Experience.

Average 4G availability across all countries is close to 80% with 15 markets over 90%. No one country appeared in the top 10 for all five metrics; however, in general, European countries dominated, racking up far more top 10 entries than any other region.




Highlights:
● Download Speed Experience scores range from over 50 Mbps to under 2 Mbps
South Korea was the only country to score over 50 Mbps in Download Speed Experience, with the majority of countries scoring in the 10-20 Mbps range across our users. We saw a huge range of scores in this metric, with the lowest average score being less than 2 Mbps.

● No country manages to break the 30ms Latency Experience milestone
In only 13 of the 87 countries we rated our users averaged Latency Experience scores under 40 milliseconds, while none scored under 30ms. One continent dominated our Latency Experience analysis, with six European countries in our top 10. 5G’s designers target much improved latency as one of their goals.

● Europe best for Video Experience — but no market has an Excellent rating
Of the top 25 countries who achieved Very Good ratings in Video Experience, only six were from outside Europe. Our users in Norway and Hungary both scored just over 74 points (out of 100) — meaning no country has yet achieved an Excellent Video Experience rating.


● Over 5 Mbps separated the top 10 in Upload Speed Experience
The biggest variation between Upload Speed Experience scores of our users was at the top end of the table, where the gap between leader Denmark and tenth-placed Canada was over 5 Mbps.

● Strong showings for the U.S. and India in 4G Availability
Only four European countries made our 4G Availability top 10 — the fewest of any of our award metrics. And both the U.S. and India made the top 10, despite being distinctly mid-table in all our other key metrics.

● Europe dominates Opensignal's key metrics
A look at the leading countries across Opensignal's metrics shows the preeminence of Europe. In a ranking of the 10 countries who scored highly across all five of our key metrics, only two were from outside Europe.



Notably, the U.S. came in 30th place for download speed. That's just below Serbia and Albania and just above Romania and Oman. The top three countries were South Korea, Norway, and Canada.

On the eve of 5G’s launch, South Korea was the only country where smartphone users enjoyed average mobile Download Speeds over 50 Mbps, although Norway was close behind with 48.2 Mbps. Then there was a bit of a drop in speeds to the next two countries, Canada and the Netherlands, where we measured Download Speed Experience at just over 42 Mbps. The remaining six of the top 10 markets scored in the 33- 40 Mbps range. The global average score of the 87 countries we analyzed was 17.6 Mbps — barely a third of the top score.

Check out the chart below and hit the link for the full report!

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