5G download speed is now faster than Wi-Fi in seven leading 5G countries

Opensignal’s latest analysis demonstrates that 5G greatly improves the real-world speeds that users experience. And, even more significantly, 5G offers faster average download speeds than Wi-Fi in seven out of eight leading 5G countries. Our findings show the importance of not letting the current COVID-19 crisis — or active anti-5G disinformation campaigns — delay 5G rollouts because the increased capacity and faster speeds that 5G enables are critical to keeping people connected today and in the future with rising network usage.

In Nov 2018, when Opensignal first compared the cellular and Wi-Fi experience, we found that in 41% of countries smartphone users experienced faster speeds on cellular networks than on Wifi overall. But many of these countries were emerging mobile-first markets, in more developed markets Wi-Fi tended to be faster. Overall, we also forecast in that report that cellular technology would improve faster than fixed networks and Wifi, and so as 5G arrived mobile speeds would rise faster than Wi-Fi. Now, we find 5G is faster than Wi-Fi in seven out of eight leading 5G countries but 4G is faster than Wifi in only two of these countries, Australia and Saudi Arabia. The US is the exception, where Wi-Fi continues to offer a small edge over 5G because of the large number of US 5G users connecting on widely available, but relatively slow, 5G networks that are deployed using low spectrum bands.