Taipei (Taiwan News)—Taiwan ranked 11th globally for mobile network speed with an overall speed of 20.49 Mbps for 3G and 4G connections, placing it fourth in Asia, according to a survey by wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal.
The country's ranking remained the same as in the previous survey from August 2016, while its mobile network speed increased incrementally by nearly 1 Mbps from 19.46 Mbps. Click here for the graph.
The number of countries breaking the 20 Mbps mobile network speed threshold or faster connections increased from nine in the last survey to 13, according to OpenSignal.
"Those top performers have largely remained the same, dominated by South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Australia in the east and a handful of northern and eastern European countries in the west. The only country on another continent to break the 20Mbps barrier in our tests was Canada," wrote the company.
South Korea ranked first in mobile network speed with an overall average of 37.5 Mbps—calculated using the average mobile data connection speed and availability of 3G and 4G networks—followed by Norway (34.77 Mbps), Hungary (31.04 Mbps), Singapore (30.05 Mbps), and Australia (26.25 Mbps).
Among Asian countries, Taiwan trailed behind Japan which had an overall mobile network speed connection of 21.79 Mbps.
Most developing countries in the process of rolling out 4G mobile connections ranked in the bottom half of the mobile network speed survey, with Costa Rica reporting the slowest mobile network speed connection of 2.69 Mbps, the Philippines second to last with 3.33 Mbps and Venezuela third from the bottom at 3.45 Mbps.
Other Asian countries including India, Indonesia, Pakistan also ranked in the lower quadrant of the survey, with average connection speeds of respectively 4.17 Mbps, 4.72 Mbps, and 3.98 Mbps.
Despite being one of the first countries to launch LTE and having the highest rates of 4G penetration in the world, the U.S. ranked in the middle of the pack with 12.48 Mbps.
"But U.S. LTE networks are on the slow side, which brings down the country's overall score. In comparison, many western European countries have extremely fast LTE connections, which puts them in the upper third of our rankings,”explained OpenSignal.
Low 4G availability has kept European countries from achieving an even higher ranking, as a majority of users still largely rely on 3G connections.
The survey conducted by the London-based technology company analyzed 19.26 billion data points collected from 1.10 million mobile phone users from 87 countries from Nov. 1, 2016 to Jan. 31, 2017.