South Korea leads the world in LTE availability, while New Zealand achieved the top 4G speeds in Open Signal's latest survey for the third quarter. Korea's three operators LG Uplus, KT and SK Telecom led the global survey in availability, all providing a LTE signal nearly 100 percent of the time. Only the top eight countries in the rankings had LTE available over 80 percent of the time; all of these were in Asia, apart from Uruguay (83%) and the Netherlands (80%).
In terms of speed, New Zealand came first with an average 36 Mbps, thanks to significant spectrum deployed by Spark and Vodafone, Open Signal said. Singapore came second with 33 Mbps, and Romania, a relative newcomer to LTE, was third at 30 Mbps, after early adoption of LTE-Advanced and multiple bands there. The top network in the world was Singapore's Starhub, at an average 38 Mbps, followed by Vodafone Romania with 36 Mbps and Denmark's TDC with 35 Mbps.
Open Signal added a new element in its latest report that tracks the overall performance of the major multinational operator groups across their different countries. Most of these operators tend be clustered in the centre of Open Signal's chart compling both LTE speed and availability, though Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Hutchison’s 3 do have a few standout networks. In South America, Telefonica’s Movistar group appears to have the upper hand over America Movil’s Claro in 4G, the study found.
