Global LTE growing but not getting much faster: report

OpenSignal, a company that specialises in wireless coverage mapping, yesterday released a report, which analyses of the state of LTE on a global scale, and measures the average LTE speeds availability on a per-country basis.

According to the report, maximum average LTE speeds in any country have plateaued at an average of 50Mbps while the global average LTE speed is 16.4 Mbps.

According to experts, what this means is the growth of average speeds has slowed down (if that makes sense) and over the past several months, networks have succeeded in expanding LTE coverage to more areas rather than focusing on making LTE faster.

India has the slowest average LTE speeds (around 5-6 Mbs) while Singapore offers the fastest average speeds (around 44-45 Mbps). Algeria with 40 per cent has the lowest LTE availability, while South Korea has the highest at around 97 per cent.

It may be noted that only three months ago, only two countries had LTE availability of 90 per cent, but, according to the latest report, LTE availability is 90 per cent in five countries - South Korea, Japan, Norway, Hong Kong, and the US, which is at 90.32 per cent.

India stands at the 14th place in 4G availability with 86.26 per cent availability. Only five countries, Ecuador, Egypt, Sri Lanka, El Salvador and Algeria failed to reach 50 per cent.