PH ranks near-bottom in LTE speed

Philippines placed 74th out of 77 countries in terms of long-term evolution (LTE) speed with 8.24 Megabits per second (Mbps). (Pixabay photo)

The Philippines ranked near the bottom in the latest global report from the London-based research firm OpenSignal on the state of Long Term Evolution (LTE) in each country.

LTE is a type of 4G or a fourth-generation mobile type of technology that provides a faster connection 10 times faster than a 3G.

Philippines placed 74th out of 77 countries in terms of LTE speed with 8.24 Megabits per second (Mbps).

According to OpenSignal, since its last report on June 2017, there are no new countries that have reached a 40-Mbps only countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Norway reached 40-Mbps.

“LTE availability is increasing worldwide, the same can’t be said for LTE speeds. No new country has joined the 40-Mbps club since our last report, and the number of countries that averaged speeds greater than 20 Mbps has fallen, rather than increased,” the report said.

“How fast a country’s 4G speed is can depend on many factors: how much spectrum is devoted to LTE, whether it has adopted new 4G technologies like LTE Advanced, how densely networks are built and how much congestion is on those networks. In general, though, the countries with the fastest speeds tend to be the ones that have built LTE-Advanced networks and have a large proportion of LTE-Advanced capable devices,” it added.

So far, no reported country that has reached 50-Mbps.

“Though individual operators have broken the 50-Mbps barrier for average 4G download speeds, we’re still waiting for the first country to consistently provide LTE connections greater than 50 Mbps. South Korea and Singapore are the closest, averaging 45.9 Mbps and 46.6 Mbps respectively,” the report said.

In the Southeast Asia, Indonesia ranked 73th with 9.02 Mbps and Thailand ranked 72th with 9.40 Mbps.

Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica, and India ranked lower the than the Philippines.

The report also released the availability of LTE connectivity which showed how consistently accessible 4G networks are in each country.

“Rather than measure geographic coverage, OpenSignal’s availability metric tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network,” the report stated.

The Philippines placed 69th with 58.83% of 4G availability.

Recently, Jack Ma, the founder Chinese e-commerce business Alibaba said that he is not impressed with the internet connection speed in the Philippines.

[READ: PH internet speed ‘no good’—Jack Ma]

He encouraged the Philippine government and entrepreneurs to partake on the improvement of the internet speed and coverage in the country.

“If we are not covering internet, it’s gonna be worse just like a hundred years ago. Our cities, our countries are not connected,” Ma said.