Opensignal, the company that analyses mobile network experience worldwide, has just released a new report on how smartphones can affect your mobile experience. The report covers the top 3 mobile brands namely Samsung, Huawei and Apple.
According to the report, Samsung users in Malaysia are experiencing download speeds of 1.3Mbps faster than Huawei users and it’s also 3.3Mbps faster than Apple iPhone users. This is a similar trend in 35% of countries among the 40 countries analysed.
Apple users are faster in 17.5% of the countries, and in the remaining 48%, none of the three was the fastest. They also noted that Huawei users were joint-fastest in seven countries.
In the US, Samsung users are getting downloads as much as 8.2Mbps faster than iPhone users. Interestingly, in Norway, Samsung users were 12Mbps faster than Huawei and 14Mbps faster than Apple iPhone users.
Apart from brands, the tier of the device themselves also plays an important role. In 25 countries, high-tier devices offer at least twice the speed of low-tier devices. In Thailand, the gap is very significant as they found high-tier devices were 4.3 times as fast as those that are using low-tier devices.
For Samsung, they shine in the high-tier category on devices, however, in the mid-tier and lower-tier category, it loses out to Huawei. Flagship phones are more capable of connecting to a wider variety of frequency bands and it can also take advantage of the better wireless technologies such as 256 QAM and 4×4 MIMO. The type of chips used such as Qualcomm, Intel, HiSilicon, Exynos or Mediatek also affects network performance as well.
Although there are more LTE Cat 16 smartphones in the market that are gigabit ready, most devices are still experiencing far lower real-world speeds. For Malaysia, OpenSignal recorded an average download speed of 19.9Mbps for high-tier devices.
For those using mid-tier devices (LTE Cat 5-15), the experience is slower with an average download speed of 13.8Mbps while low-tier devices (LTE Cat 4 and below) clocks a slower average download speed of 12.3Mbps.
Apart from download speed, high-tier devices also offer higher upload speed which is important for streamers. On top of that, the newer flagship devices also provide lower latency which is crucial for mobile gaming.
You can read the full report here.
