4G LTE speeds declining globally – Pakistan at the bottom of the list

A recent report from OpenSignal has revealed that there is not much improvement in 4G LTE speeds in the fastest networks around the world, with no country yet able to crack the 50 Mbps mark.

Singapore, South Korea, and Hungary have most stable speeds during the year 2017. Sadly, Pakistan is at the bottom of the list in terms of availability and speed as well.

OpenSignal, a globally renowned firm for the wireless mapping has revealed its test results for 2017 which are unfortunately embarrassing. The company found that the number of top performing countries with average 4G data rates of more than 20Mb/s is falling rather than increasing.

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OpenSignal doesn’t estimate the figures through geographical coverage, on the contrary, the company’s availability metric tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network. With this estimation, Pakistan’s 4G availability score marks 57.15% leaving only 5 countries behind it.

Though the report has claimed that cellular networks and internet service providers all around the world are unable to upgrade their services from a certain point, yet our neighbor India has been successful in achieving the 11th position in terms of availability of 4G services.

According to the report,

“The global 4G market has reached a transition point. Instead of focusing on boosting speeds, we now see an industry intent on boosting accessibility to 4G signals. In our latest global report, OpenSignal parsed more than 50 billion measurements worldwide to see how 77 countries stacked up in 4G performance.”

However, while talking about speed comparisons Pakistan and India are very close to each other in making the list from the bottom. Pakistan has an average 4G speed of 11.67 Mbps while India is even lower with 6.13 Mbps. The major reason behind this position of India could be the availability of 4G services to a large population.

The global average 4G download speed did increase slightly from 16.2 Mbps to 16.6 Mbps in the last six months.

This report poses a question mark on Pakistan’s IT and Telecom regulators and network providers that they must expand their efforts to boost 4G/LTE services in Pakistan.