Countries Ranked by 4G Download Speed at Different Times of Day

Crowd-sourced data analyst firm OpenSignal has today published a new report that examines how future 5G based Mobile Broadband networks could solve the congestion problems of current 4G networks, which includes a ranking of 77 countries by average download speed experienced at different times of day.

The new report stems from app-based crowd-sourced data that was gathered from 94,071,939 total devices and 585,738,011,995 total measurements between 1st January and 31st December 2018. Across the 77 countries studied it notes that 4G (LTE) download speeds are between 31.2Mbps and 5.8Mbps faster at the “best hour of day” compared with the slowest hour of the day.

While some countries offered much more consistency in speed than others, every country was still found to have some degree of speed fluctuation throughout the day. As a result Opensignal believes that congestion on current 4G networks is holding back speeds and that this in turn helps to highlight areas where future multi-Gigabit capable ultrafast 5G networks could help.

General Study Highlights

* Even at the most demanding high-data-traffic hours, most European countries were able to maintain a minimum 4G Download Speed average of 20Mbps. There were seven exceptions, but three of them fell just below the 20Mbps mark during their slowest times: the UK (19.7 Mbps), Italy (19 Mbps) and Ukraine (18.8 Mbps). Belarus, Ireland, Poland and the Russian Federation, however, were far below that benchmark.

* The most consistent country in our 77 nation analysis hailed from Europe. In the Czech Republic, the difference between best 4G Download Speed and worst speed over 24 hours was only 20%. That means consumers are likely noticing little change in their average speeds even during the peak-usage hours of the day.

* The UK and the Netherlands were quite the anomalies in our hour-of-the-day analysis. While the vast majority of European countries racked up their busiest hours between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., UK consumers were most active on 4G networks at 5 p.m. while for the Netherlands the peak time was one hour earlier.

* While wild fluctuations speeds were common in all European cities, London had some particular broad pendulum swings throughout the day, ranging from 17.5Mbps to 38.3Mbps. The only European city in our sample with bigger fluctuations in speed was Paris.

The report states that even the fastest 4G countries need 5G to “counter big drops in speeds at busy times.” For example, South Korea and Singapore, users experienced a speed gap of 13Mbps between the fastest and slowest hours, despite having the two highest average download speeds measured of 55.7Mbps and 54.7Mbps respectively.

At this point it’s worth noting that 5G by itself is, not unlike 4G before it, just as vulnerable to capacity problems if network operators don’t supply their masts and cell sites with enough capacity (both in terms of backhaul and radio spectrum). Indeed if existing 4G networks had more spectrum and data capacity then we suspect that many of the fluctuations identified in today’s report might be less of a problem.