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A new study has shown that download speeds over mobile is faster than WiFi in many countries.
The report by OpenSignal said in 33 countries, smartphone users now experience faster average download speeds using a mobile network than using Wifi.
The range of countries where mobile proves faster vary widely from richer countries such as Australia, where the benefit of using mobile was greatest where smartphone users experienced average download speeds13 Mbps faster on mobile than Wifi, and France (+2.5 Mbps) to markets across every continent, for example:
Qatar (+11.8 Mbps); Turkey (+7.3 Mbps); Mexico (+1.5 Mbps) & South Africa (+5.7 Mbps).
The report said in 3 “highly developed geographies” – Hong Kong, Singapore & the USA – the
mobile experience bucks the global trend & significantly “underperforms” compared with smartphone users’ Wifi download experience with a slower mobile experience of -38.6 Mbps, -34 Mbps and -25 Mbps, respectively.
The time smartphones spend connected to Wifi had no significant correlation with users experiencing faster Wifi speeds relative to those on mobile, because smartphones will automatically connect to known Wifi networks without including speed as a factor in their decision.
In 50 countries, 63% of those studied, 4G networks offered a faster smartphone download experience
than Wifi, up from 41% of countries when compared with overall mobile download experience instead of 4G. Just 7 countries saw a faster experience on 3G, & even in those countries the speed advantage of a 3G mobile experience was modest, at best an increase of 3Mbps in Lebanon.
The study forecast that 5G will accelerate the advantage of mobile technology because of the pace of mobile innovation & the dependency of Wifi network experiences on the quality of fixed network broadband deployments which are slow and expensive to upgrade with fiber to the premise (FTTP).
