America has slower LTE wireless than Canada or Mexico

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto during November's APEC Summit in Peru. Photo from The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto during November’s APEC Summit in Peru. Photo from The Canadian Press

A new report on wireless broadband is out, and it may not leave readers cheering “USA! USA!” According to OpenSignal’s study, Mexico, Canada, France, the United Kingdom and more than 50 other countries offer faster LTE cellular data speeds than the U.S.

Still, the latest installment of this biannual survey by the London-based research firm isn’t all bad. OpenSignal’s findings, based on almost 20 million reports collected by its app from 558,260 users in the first quarter of the year, also show that the U.S. is making strong progress in expanding LTE availability to more users, even if it’s not always the fastest.

A need for speed in any language

According to OpenSignal’s data the average LTE download speed in the U.S. was 14.99 megabits per second (Mbps) in the first quarter of 2017. That’s not exactly bad — it’s an improvement from the 13.95 Mbps average it the survey reported six months earlier. But a wide variety of other countries offered much faster speeds.

A speedier wireless connection means you can download apps faster and share photos quicker, as well as stream Ultra High Definition video and transfer the sort of files that would ordinarily require a wired connection.

Singapore led OpenSignal’s list with an average of 45.62 Mbps, followed by South Korea with 43.46 Mbps and Hungary with 42.61 Mbps.

The next dozen countries all saw average download speeds above 30 Mbps. You can fairly object that most are in one part of Europe or another and therefore don’t require local wireless carriers to cover large expanses like the American West, but Australia still manages 33.76 Mbps while Canada tops out at 30.58 Mbps.

The U.S., meanwhile, lingers in the bottom 20 with 14.99 Mbps. That’s below the worldwide average of 16.4 Mbps and behind Russia (16.64 Mbps), Hong Kong (16.01 Mbps) and Jordan (15.09 Mbps). Sixteen countries trail the States, with India (5.14 Mbps, barely faster than 3G) coming closest in terms of population and area. OpenSignal didn’t post data for China.

Another bandwidth-analysis service, Ookla’s Speedtest.net, posted somewhat consistent numbers in its last round of country-specific figures. It found that LTE-capable phones that could connect to a network in the U.S. averaged 19.61 Mbps over the first six months of 2016. In Canada, LTE phones yielded 25.21 Mbps downloads on average, while in Mexico they managed speeds of 16.19 Mbps.

The other part of the equation: availability

The U.S. might not have the fastest data speeds, but it does have one of the highest “availability” scores — OpenSignal’s term for how much time users stay connected to an LTE network.