Report: Most countries now have LTE, but it still doesn’t beat Wi-Fi

LTE is something many of us rely on day-to-day, but according to a new report by OpenSignal — the best signal probably isn’t where you are.

Once again, South Korea is just plain killing it when it comes to LTE coverage (97 percent of the country has it), but New Zealand offers the fastest LTE in the world (36 Mbps download on average). Singapore’s StarHub is the fastest network in this test with an average download speed of 38 Mbps.

OpenSignal’s study comes from over 325,000 users worldwide.

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There’s a lot of granular data in OpenSignal’s study, and some key takeaways for major markets. In the UK, EE is fastest for data with an 18 Mbps average download speed.

All other UK carriers tested — 3, Vodafone and O2 — averaged 12 Mbps.

While 12 Mbps is ho-hum in the UK, it’s tops in the United States. T-Mobile and Verizon led the pack at that download speed, while AT&T had 8 Mbps. Sprint has 6 Mbps download speeds.

At least T-Mobile CEO John Legere is backing his trash talk up with class-leading data speeds.

While LTE blows 2G and 3G data speeds away, it’s still much slower than Wi-Fi on average. Below, you can see that LTE data transfer speeds are typically half of what you can get via Wi-Fi.

But the coolest takeaway from the report is the GIF at the top of this article, which shows LTE rollout globally over the course of six years. Faster is always nice, but I’d rather see more people with LTE.