Bell, Telus and Rogers all have fast download speeds, according to a new report, but Telus is slightly faster than its competition | Shutterstock
Canada’s big three wireless providers—Bell (TSX:BCE), Telus (TSX:T) and Rogers (TSX:RCI.B)—have strong mobile data speeds compared with those found in other countries around the world, but Telus’ download speed ekes out a slight advantage over its competitors.
According to a report released January by OpenSignal, a London-based firm that performs wireless coverage mapping, Telus’ average overall download speed was 24.1 Mbps, which was a hair faster than those of Bell (22.09 Mbps) and Rogers (21.25 Mbps).
OpenSignals pointed out that Telus and Bell share an extensive network that includes shared towers, radio access infrastructure and spectrum, but the difference in overall speed between the two providers is not surprising.
“We wouldn’t expect their results to be exactly the same,” the report said. “Both Telus and Bell are traditionally stronger in different regions of the country and in some cases have gone after different subscriber segments.
“ Also, Bell and Telus may share the radio network, but they maintain different network cores, which can lead to subtle differences in performance, particularly in the final metric we cover: latency.”
OpenSignal said Telus was the clear winner for latency, which measures data connection responsiveness.
Two of the wireless providers were tied in terms of 4G availability, which measures the proportion of time users had access to an LTE connection.
“Rogers and Telus shared the award for best availability as OpenSignal testers were able to latch on to their LTE networks just over 80% of the time, but Bell was an extremely close third with a 4G availability score of 78.3%,” the report showed.
OpenSignal compiled the report from looking at a total of 15,272 Canadian users and more than 289 million datapoints.
via BIV
