(Image: OpenSignal)
Telecommunications coverage mapping company OpenSignal has released its quarterly State of Mobile Networks report for Australia, awarding multiple network speed, availability, and latency gongs to Vodafone.
"In the six months since OpenSignal's last State of Mobile Networks report for Australia, Vodafone has been quite busy," the company said.
"In our most recent test period covering January through March, Vodafone moved into a lead role in all of our metrics, either winning or drawing every award category.
"Vodafone has jumped ahead of Telstra in our 4G speed metric, averaging LTE downloads of 40Mbps."
Vodafone Australia won the 4G download speed category with average speeds of 39.97Mbps for its users, followed by Telstra at 37.56Mbps, and Optus at 33.58Mbps. Optus had the highest 3G speeds at 6.82Mbps, followed by Vodafone at 6.33Mbps, and Telstra at 5.73Mbps.
Overall download speed was also taken out by Vodafone, which OpenSignal averaged out at 34.65Mbps; Telstra came second, with 32.32Mbps; and Optus came third, with 29.19Mbps.
"You could never accuse any Australian operator of pokey 4G speeds, though," OpenSignal added. "All three major operators averaged downloads greater than 33Mbps in our LTE tests, which is nearly double the global 4G average of 16.9Mbps."
In terms of latency, Vodafone had the shortest over its 4G network, at 30.3 milliseconds, followed by Optus with 32.72ms and Telstra with 38.15ms. Latency over 3G was taken out by Optus, with 60.84ms, followed by Vodafone at 62.8ms and Telstra at 73.31ms.
On the percentage of time that each telco's customers had 4G available to them, Vodafone ranked highest, at 88.49 percent, followed by Optus at 88.31 percent and Telstra at 86.6 percent -- although it should be noted that Telstra