Despite making a late entry into the 3G and 4G markets, 2014 to be exact, more than half of all mobile phone users in the country are now using these services.
Open Signal, a company that specializes in wireless coverage mapping released a report that calculates Pakistan’s 3G networks at 63.47 per cent, that is almost two-thirds of all connections.
The site calculates the availability metric by measuring how often users can see a 3G or 4G signal on their device.
South Korea topped the chart with 98.54 per cent of users having 3G or better connection. Meanwhile, India only had a 56.10 per cent availability score which is surprising given the county launched 3G in 2008.
The report by Open Singnal also included the overall speeds for each country with Pakistan averaging at 3.33 Mbps which is lower than India’s 5.30 Mbps. South Korea topped this category as well clocking in at 41.34 Mbps.
Overall speeds also take into account the availability of the services offered in each country which is why a country with fast LTE speeds but low 4G availability might have a much lower overall speed than a country with moderate LTE speeds but a very high level of 4G availability.
Another category included in the report is Time on WiFi. The metric shows the percentage of time that users in each country were connected to WiFi networks rather than cellular networks.
Pakistan’s score here came in a 34.12 percent suggesting that one third of the time users were connected to the internet using their WiFi in favor of mobile internet. Netherlands topped this list with a score on 70%.
Open Signal gathers its data for the study using millions of devices that have downloaded their app as opposed to test-drive data that use same devices in a small number of locations which are not representative of the whole population. This results in data that is not biased and reports that are a lot more accurate and reliable.