The U.S. has the 39th fastest mobile data speeds out of 95 countries across the world, according to a report released Wednesday by OpenSignal, a British firm that gathers data on mobile networks.
When it comes to “overall speed,” the champion by far is South Korea, followed by Singapore. The country with the slowest connection is Afghanistan.
The U.S. fell right below Turkey and the United Arab Emirates in the overall speed ranking, and above Poland and Ireland. The company defines the overall speed metric “as the average mobile data connection a user experiences based on both the speeds and availability of a country’s 3G and 4G networks.”
In another category that examined the availability of a 4G or 3G signal, the U.S. fared better, ranked 17 out of 95.
“One thing is clear from our results: a decent mobile data connection isn’t hard to find in a majority of the world’s countries,” the company wrote in the report.
A chart that considers both those metrics together— speed and availability— shows that South Korea remains king, with very fast speeds (41.34 Mbps) and a very high availability of good data connections (over 98 percent). The U.S. was grouped near Israel and Bulgaria on that chart, with an overall speed of 12.34 Mbps but a 3G or higher availability of nearly 92 percent.
The report, which is based on data gathered between May 1 and July 23, also considers how often a user is on Wi-Fi, as opposed to a cellular connection. The Dutch love using Wi-Fi the most: they’re on those networks 70 percent of the time. Americans were connected to Wi-Fi just over half the time.
OpenSignal gathers data through an app. Read the full report here.
Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger
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