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Out of the 95 countries tracked in the report, smartphone users spent more than 50 per cent of their time connected to Wi-Fi in 46 countries.
Wi-Fi has arguably become a far more important mobile data technology than 3G or 4G in many countries, according to a new report from OpenSignal.
The Global State of Networks, which is a brand new report from the network measurement company, found that people in many countries across the globe still rely on Wi-Fi networks when surfing on their smartphones.
“We found high levels of mobile Wi-Fi connections both in countries where mobile broadband is ubiquitous and in countries where mobile data infrastructure is more limited. The most mobile-Wi-Fi hungry country in the world was the Netherlands, where Wi-Fi accounted for 70% of all of the smartphone connections we measured,” OpenSignal said.
Out of the 95 countries tracked in the report, smartphone users spent more than 50 per cent of their time connected to Wi-Fi in 46 countries.
In terms of 3G and 4G, the company found that 3G is still a very important form of connectivity in most countries. However, mobile data speeds vary hugely between countries: the report found that South Korea had the fastest overall speed of 41.3 Mbps, while the slowest average measured was 2.2 Mbps in Afghanistan.
“There’s a huge variation in speeds between the slowest 3G network and the fastest 4G network. CDMA EV-DO connections, for instance, typically average download speeds under 1 Mbps, while high-powered LTE-Advanced connections can push speed well beyond 30 Mbps,” OpenSignal said.
The report is based on 12,356,994,498 datapoints collected from 822,556 users during the period from 1 May to 23 July 2016.
