back to article If you're reading this on your phone, pray you're in Singapore

If you're reading this on your phone, pray you're in Singapore, New Zealand, Hungary or Israel, because they're the four nations where LTE networks deliver the fastest downloads. Clasp your hands and look heavenwards again if you live in the United Kingdom or United States , as those nations come in 29th and 55th respectively in …

  1. NotBob

    The USA slump may have something to do with having to cover an area considerably larger than those tiny places getting all the speed.

    1. thames

      The US rank far below Canada, which is bigger in area and has fewer people. If you look at the chart in the linked story which shows speed by carrier, the third fastest is Sasktel, which covers Saskatchewan - pretty much the definition of very few people spread over a huge area. The rest of the major Canadian carriers fall much lower, but are still well above the US.

      I suspect that slow US speeds are mainly due to the market being dominated by very few companies whose customers have few good alternatives.

      In Canada, the province of Saskatchewan has the lowest prices and the highest speeds despite having the lowest population density of any of the provinces. The fact that Sasktel is government owned while the phone industry in the rest of the country is privately owned probably has something to do with it.

      1. Charles 9

        There are those who would say Canada's population is more concentrated geographically (primarily towards the south) than in the US. Does the assessment of Canada take note of its territories, Northwest and Nunavut, who are closer to Alaska in terms of the need to service a population?

      2. Eddy Ito

        Sasktel may also have one thing working in their favor and that's that it's easier to feed high data rates to a few people than it is to feed high data rates to many. With 54% LTE coverage it seems pretty clear that not everyone is getting LTE speeds but the few that do are getting blistering speeds. I'd also wager they don't have their calls dropped as often as more population dense areas do.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      There are too many counter-examples. Canada, Australia, even China compares pretty well.

      Nope, it's the entrenched regional monopolies, and political corruption (lobbying) shielding them from competition.

    3. ecofeco Silver badge

      Yeah, no. It's all about screwing the customer and nothing else.

  2. cirby

    A number of those "high speed LTE" countries also have fewer subscribers per tower. It's easier to get 40 megabits when less than ten percent of cell subscribers even have LTE phones.

    The US, on the other hand, has gone from twenty percent of subscribers with LTE phones to eighty percent - in about two years.

    1. Chris Miller

      And Singapore is a city state. You can cover the whole country with a few dozen masts.

  3. scottyman

    Most of my travel is between Aus and NZ, so when I was last in the UK, I was convinced there was something horribly wrong, as 4G was awful, and WiFi in hotels and airports was about as bad as I've ever seen it.

    1. tiggity Silver badge

      hotel wifi

      Is normally deliberately dismal on the free offering to try & persuade you to go the paid option (but in general the wifi best avoided totally on security grounds in most hotels)

  4. Christian Berger

    It's a question of political will

    For example in Germany in the 1980s there was a project called BIGFON, it was designed to explore the possibilities of the (then news) fibre optic cables for use in subscriber line. The idea was to give every subscriber 280 MBit/s downstream and 140MBit/s upstream and once testing was successful and suitable standards were found, to go ahead and provide that kind of service to everyone in Germany. Even the money was already there from profits the post office made...

    The project was aborted for political reasons. The results can be seen now. Most Germans don't even have access to one megabit. The German telecommunications equipment industry is _far_ behind the competition. You cannot buy a German equivalent to a Cisco. Companies like Siemens, which used to be on the forefront of innovation, didn't feel any need to innovate any more, so development stagnated to a halt. Gradually you had the choice between equipment from Siemens, or equipment from the rest of the competition, which had more capacity with less rack space... and was cheaper. So Siemens regularly sells off their innovative departments when they fail to meet arbitrarily set goals, which then go bust because they don't have the momentum to survive.

    Investing in those projects has long lasting effects, even far beyond the actual project. If Singapore wants to have an advanced cellular network, they will need lots of network engineers. They will have people who are inspired by this to go into engineering and those people will get jobs.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's a question of political will

      Strangly enough, I had no trouble getting a 100Mbit connection to my home after moving to Germany. I've struggled for years trying to get above 2Mbit in Canada, while paying about 50% more. Modern houses in a major city, in either case.

      I won't even get started on the difference in price, coverage, and end-customer terms and conditions for wireless internet in Canada and in Germany. I do not know how these folks collected the data in their review, but it sure as hell is not consistent with my personal experience.

      1. thames

        Re: It's a question of political will

        @Anonymous Coward - "I've struggled for years trying to get above 2Mbit in Canada,"

        I don't know of any major ISP in my area in Canada that's even selling anything that slow these days. The slowest connection from someone like Bell you can buy these days is 15 Mbps. Meanwhile they're calling me all the time and knocking on my door trying to flog me 1 Gbps fibre. I'm in a smaller city by the way.

        If you had 2 Mbps in any recent years in Canada, then either you were off on the end of a semi-rural line or you had other hardware problems, possibly in your on-premises wiring or local loop. A high error rate will give you what is effectively a slow speed. That's the problem with anecdotes, they tend to be from the one person who had a problem and was unhappy about it, rather than what the overwhelming majority experiences.

        I'm with a smaller ISP who have an extra cheap 5 Mbps package (along with faster ones). I've picked that one because I don't download movies, and even 5 Mbps is more than fast enough for Youtube, web browsing, Github, email, and all the other stuff I do. And I'm tight with my money as you may guess.

        As for 2 Mbps? Never heard of it from anyone.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It's a question of political will

          "I don't know of any major ISP in my area in Canada that's even selling anything that slow these days. The slowest connection from someone like Bell you can buy these days is 15 Mbps. "

          Absolutely. The only tiny little problem is that asterisk on the advertised speed, which says "up to".

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Even a 3G signal would be nice

    500yds from the A23 London to Brighton road in parts of Crawley on Voda or Three

    At the back of the house you might get 1 bar. At the front? Are you kidding.

    Thank god for next door's wi-fi that is open to everyone.

    Until these 'Not spots' are sorted I really don't care about LTE speeds.

    In this US Presidential Election year (yawn) I am reminded of the old campaign slogan, 'Where's the Beef?"

    It is no use giving the Celebs whizzo LTE when the rest of us plebs get sweet-f-all.

  6. John Savard

    Canada

    I'm in Canada, so I had to follow the link to the full report. I see that while we're well behind Singapore, we are significantly ahead of the United States.

  7. ecofeco Silver badge

    At least the USA has...

    At least the USA has high speed trains!

    Oh wait.

    Well at least they have the best public education system!

    Oh wait.

    Well then they have the best medical care in the world!

    Oh wait.

    Highways?

    Nope?

    Safety laws?

    Nope?

    Well by god they have the best nukes!

    See? Knew there was something!

    1. Florida1920

      Re: At least the USA has...

      See? Knew there was something!

      Guns.

      1. WolfFan Silver badge

        Re: At least the USA has...

        If you consider numbers, yes, the US is ahead in guns. If you consider quality... nope. There are far too many idiots with variants on 7.62-mm AKs and cheap 9-mm pistols out there. (And then there are all those 5.56-mm copies of M-16s. God help us.) Switzerland and even Belgium have a far better proportion of _good_ guns than the US. The US military knows this; they use, for example, Belgian weapons at the squad level, 'cause they _know_ that the US hasn't made a good squad automatic weapon since the days of the BAR, and even then the BAR wasn't that good, it was just the best American weapon available.

  8. Knoydart
    Thumb Up

    Rural New Zealand roll out

    A couple of reasons for the New Zealand rural roll out. The cell cos have roll out coverage obligations - for both 700 MHz and 2600 MHz for the next few years. Secondly Spark (formally Telecom NZ) have traditionally had better rural coverage, and Vodafone (the current leader in the urban game) are trying to get all the dairy dollars on to their network.

  9. Sebastian A

    NZ's LTE networks are only fast because...

    Nobody is using them.

    There aren't any unlimited data plans here. "Casual" data rates run at up to NZ$90 (US$60, €53) per gigabyte. On-account data is a bit cheaper at roughly NZ$20 per gig (depending on bundles etc).

    "Here, have some fast data. Don't you dare use it or we'll take your house."

  10. Kev99 Silver badge

    Just goes to show the comm industry in the USA is more concerned about Wall Street and their exec's wallets than they are about their customers.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like