Yesterday, Opensignal released a new report comparing the broadband experience offered by dominant players in Canada.
The fixed network providers were rated across six metrics – Broadband Success Rate, Broadband Consistent Quality, Broadband Video Experience, Broadband Download Speed, Broadband Peak Download Speed and Broadband Upload Speed, during average and peak hours (10 a.m. to 4 p.m).
The report showed that Telus dominates the broadband market in Western Canada, scoring the highest across most of the metrics, notably, Broadband Consistent Quality (whether users’ experience on a network is sufficient to support common applications’ requirements), Broadband Upload Speed and Broadband Video Experience.
But Shaw also got a bite out of the Albertan market, with fastest Broadband Download Speed, clocking in at 145.8Mbps, which is almost 20 per cent faster than Telus fibre.
However, the recent completion of the Rogers-Shaw merger might shake up Telus’ dominance in Western Canada, where Rogers has been mandated to invest millions of dollars to expand its presence, create jobs and improve connectivity and 5G, in a bid to boost competition.
But for now, Telus stays dominant across British Columbia as well, scoring higher than Shaw, for Broadband Consistent Quality, Broadband Video Experience, Broadband Upload Speed, and Broadband Success Rate (measures the average proportion of successfully completed tests relative to all the tests executed for each unique Wi-Fi network on each provider).
Meanwhile, Rogers competes better in Ontario against Bell, which is number one across all six categories.
Rogers ties with Bell for top average Broadband Download Speed in Ontario, with both operators’ speeds bordering around the 165Mbps mark — around 52.9 per cent faster than next placed Cogeco.
Rogers also comes second in Broadband Peak Download Speed, by a margin of less than five per cent.
But Bell’s Broadband Upload Speed and Broadband Consistent Quality scores are much stronger, outpacing Rogers and Cogeco by at least five percentage points.
In Quebec, broadband competition is the fiercest, with Vidéotron, Telus and Cogeco enjoying a fair share of the market but Bell still nabbing the top spot, as it does in the Atlantic Provinces, where Rogers and Eastlink are also strong competitors.
Shaw, however, accounts for the best broadband experience across several metrics in Saskatchewan, closely followed by SaskTel, and in Manitoba, where Bell also delivered high broadband scores.
However, while Bell and Telus were the best performers across many provinces and several broadband metrics used in this report, their non-fibre counterparts lagged significantly, the report showed.
Opensignal classifies the following as non-fibre:
- Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL or ADSL2+).
- Fibre to the curb/cabinet (FTTC) technologies such as Very high-speed digital subscriber lines (VDSL) or G.fast.
- Cable networks, for example: DOCSIS or Hybrid fibre coax (HFC).
- 4G or 5G or other types of fixed wireless access (FWA).
- Satellite
