Samsung Users Experience Faster 4G Speeds than Apple or Huawei

Crowd-sourced analyst firm Opensignal has tested the Mobile Broadband speeds experienced by the three largest Smartphone makers (by shipment volume) across 73 countries – Apple, Huawei and Samsung – and concluded that Samsung users experienced faster download speeds. But the wider picture is more complicated.

Opensignal took a total of 117,846,554,241 measurements across 23.3 million Smartphones between 1st April and 30th June 2019. The results found that Samsung users experienced faster download speeds than Apple and Huawei users in 35% of countries (across 40 countries analysed), although Apple users were faster in 17.5% of countries. Meanwhile, in the remaining 48%, none of the three were fastest but Huawei users were joint-fastest in 7 countries.

Generally speaking the performance of different Smartphones is far more likely to be hobbled by mobile network capacity than that of their own chipsets, although certainly some models do ship with more capable 4G modems than others. Equally there are other complications to consider, such as the fact that certain models may not support all of a particular markets available radio spectrum bands for optimum performance.

In order to show the impact of different modems the research also grouped each brand’s users based on their device’s LTE Category (this reflects the industry standard for 4G network capability) and put them into three tiers.

Low-tier Smartphones supported the older and slower LTE Category 4 or lower standards, while Medium-tier covered LTE Category 5-15 and High-tier was only for the fastest and most modern LTE Category 16 and up devices. The latter includes some 5G capable phones but few will actually be using those connections (i.e. most of the time they’ll be on 4G).

In terms of High-tier phones, once again Samsung (Android) users experienced the fastest download speeds and enjoyed 26.6Mbps globally, which compares with 25.1Mbps for Apple (iOS) users and just 24.4Mbps for Huawei (Android) users. However the situation changes for Medium-tier and Low-tier phones.

Apple’s problem is that few of its current models are high-tier devices (just 14% of Apple users in the testing). Instead, Apple has chosen to focus its handset designs on other capabilities such as facial recognition, camera innovation, battery life and extremely fast processors etc.

By comparison all of Samsung and Huawei’s flagship models for the last couple of years have featured so-called “gigabit” capable mobile broadband modem designs (LTE Category 16 and above). At present only the iPhone XS and XS Max are said in the report to have such capability.

Mind you Apple users won’t be missing much because real-world average speeds on Cat 16+ devices don’t even get close to 1Gbps. Such phones saw just 30.7Mbps in the UK and the fastest was 70.6Mbps in South Korea, although these are averages and it would have been nice to see a figure for the top 10% of peak speeds.

As usual there are other caveats to this sort of crowd-sourced data. For example, this can be impacted by any other limitations of the devices being used, which at the same time removes the ability to adopt a common type of hardware in order to establish a solid baseline of performance for scientific modelling and comparison. So take all of this with a pinch of salt but it’s still a useful summary of large-scale testing.