Telus has been crowned as the fastest mobile network in Canada by PCMag for the third year in a row.
In their seventh annual Fastest Networks Canada test, PCMag’s mobile experts drove through all ten provinces in Canada, covering 29 smaller and major cities to test speed and coverage of Rogers, Bell, Freedom, Telus, Sasktel, and Videotron. As per the results of the test, Telus has been outshining Bell to become the fastest nationwide mobile network in Canada for three consecutive years.
The report reveals that Bell remains on number two, far ahead of its rivals but Telus on capacity and speed in most cities, followed by Rogers and Sasktel. Freedom and Eastlink lag behind them all in the battle.
PCMag said that the reason why Telus keeps winning is because the carrier shares a large number of its towers and a lot of its spectrum with Bell, which provides the two carriers with extensive shared resources.
The report also reveals that most major cities in Canada are now getting the hang of average LTE speeds that are better than the new 5G network by Sprint in the U.S., indicating that 4G technologies still have a lot of potential and that Canadian mobile networks are outperforming the ones in the U.S. in some ways.
While speed and coverage of major mobile network carriers is commendable in urban Canada, it is in the rural areas where these carriers face real challenges. PCMag’s mobile network experts found that speeds suffered in rural Ontario, Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick. They also found mobile network situation in Newfoundland to be very weird and expect the recent auction of 600MHz to be of some help there.
