Singapore has the fastest 4G speed in the world.

This is according to a February 2018 report, “The State of LTE” by OpenSignal, a UK-based wireless technology company OpenSignal.

The report compares 4G performance across 88 countries worldwide.

Fastest 4G speed

In the June 2017 report previously, Singapore vied with South Korea for the top spot for 4G speed, and came in first with a speed of 45.62Mbps (megabits per second).

In 2018, Singapore's 4G speed fell to 44.31Mbps.

However, Singapore still managed to claim the top spot as South Korea's 4G speed fell to 40.44Mbps.

Apart from Singapore and South Korea, other countries that have performed well in this respect are Netherlands, Norway and Hungary.

In the Southeast Asian region, countries like Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia fared poorly with a 4G speed of no more than 15Mbps.

Nowhere near 50Mbps

In general, the report explains that countries with the fastest speeds tend to have LTE-Advanced (a mobile communication standard) networks and have a large proportion of LTE-Advanced capable devices.

Yet, despite these fast speeds, the fastest 4G countries are experiencing stagnation.

Average speeds were still around 40 to 45Mbps, nowhere near the 50Mpbs benchmark, a.k.a. the Holy Grail of 4G speeds.

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4G availability not as good

In order to measure accessibility, OpenSignal tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network, showing how consistently accessible 4G networks are in each country.

Coming in top on this chart is South Korea (97.4 percent), Japan (94.7 percent) and Norway (92.16 percent).

Singapore came in 19th place with a 84.43 percent availability.

This showed that countries with the fastest speeds aren't necessarily the ones with the most accessible 4G networks.

We trailed behind 18 countries in terms of 4G availability.

This is a 2 percent improvement from last year's figure of 82.08 percent, but still nowhere near the top.

To be fair though, 84 percent is still considered pretty good as a score of 80 percent of higher indicates a mature 4G market with widespread access to LTE.

OpenSignal considers a 4G availability score of 90 percent to be "truly exceptional," and only two countries, Japan and South Korea, have ever surpassed that mark in the entire history of their reports.

You can view the full "The State of LTE" report here.

Top photo from Pexels