Survey Says Korea Has World’s Highest LTE Download Speed

A survey has found that Korea has the highest LTE download speed in the world.

Global network market researcher OpenSignal said on June 4 it has found that Korea is the only country with a 4G download speed of over 50 Mbps in its survey of 87 countries around the world conducted from January to March this year.

Korea recorded an average of 52.4 Mbps 4G download speed, followed by Norway with 48.2 Mbps, Canada with 42.5 Mbps and the Netherlands with 42.4 Mbps. Singapore placed fifth with 39.3 Mbps, followed by Australia with 37.4 Mbps, Switzerland with 35.2 Mbps and Denmark with 34.6 Mbps.

Iraq, on the other hand, had the lowest speed at 1.6 Mbps, while Algeria and Nepal recorded 3.1 Mbps and 4.4 Mbps, respectively.

"Korea was the only country where smartphone users enjoyed an average mobile download speed of more than 50Mbps before the launch of 5G services," OpenSignal said. "The average mobile download speed in 87 countries was 17.6 Mbps, which is only one-third of Korea's."

Korea ranked first with 97.5 percent in 4G availability as well. Japan (96.3 percent), Norway (95.5 percent), Hong Kong (94.1 percent) and the United States (93 percent) joined the ranks of the top five. In terms of upload speed, Denmark claimed first place with 15.3 Mbps and Korea recorded 15.1 Mbps.

However, Korea stayed at 21st place in terms of latency, which is a time difference between senders and viewers. It recorded 42.2 milliseconds. A millisecond (ms) is a thousandth of a second. Singapore had the lowest latency of 30.7 ms and Hungary nabbed second place with 33.4 ms. In terms of video experiences, Korea also ranked 24th, the bottom of the top group, with 65.6 points out of 100 points.