March 17th 2021

Telus consistently offered the best mobile experience to customers using its service, according to Tutela’s latest 2021 State of Mobile Experience report for Canada. Telus dominated in three of the six metrics tested, and two ties with Bell for download speeds and coverage. In particular, Telus had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 88.4%, indicating that it provides Canada’s best mobile experience (in areas where all three national operators provide coverage). Excellent Consistent Quality is Tutela’s metric for measuring when connections are good enough for demanding applications such as 1080p video streaming, real-time mobile gaming and HD video calling. Telus also had the highest Core Consistent Quality at 95.2%, which represents how often consumers can access applications like SD video streaming, social media sharing or web browsing.

Bell was also on the leaderboard alongside Telus for the fastest download speeds in Common Coverage Areas across Canada, and both tied for the highest coverage score. Bell was the leader for the most responsive network (measured using median one-way latency) at 17.1 ms, while Rogers had the fastest median upload speed at 15.8 Mbps. 

In order to benchmark mobile experience over the last six months, Tutela has evaluated nearly 900,000 speed and latency tests, conducted on the smartphones of real-world users of national mobile operators within Common Coverage Areas, between September 1st 2020 and February 28th, 2021. 

Key findings from this report include:

• Canada’s status as a nation with high-performing wireless networks was once again on display, as all operators reported performance results — particularly download throughput — well above the average in many other countries.
• Telus led for mobile experience, both for demanding and day-to-day applications (Excellent and Core Consistent Quality), as well as tying for fastest median download speed with Bell
• Rogers and Bell both also managed to win one distinct category apiece, with Rogers taking the lead for the fastest median upload speed, and Bell demonstrating the most responsive connections with the best median latency
• With additional spectrum yet to be deployed for 5G, Canada’s status as a frontrunner for network performance will require further investment in the short-to-medium run. The spectrum auctions coming up this year — and how quickly operators are able to deploy new spectrum — will be critical for Canada’s wireless future, at least on the global stage. 

Tom Luke, VP at Tutela, said: “Canada is a world-leader in mobile network performance and all operators continue to showcase this to us with their outstanding results. The battleground for top spot in mobile experience can be a tough one for operators to pull away from, and this will continue to be true now with investments in 5G currently underway in Canada. Operators will need to ensure that their rollout strategy not only maintains Canada’s reputations for outstanding network speeds, but also focuses on other metrics of network experience that can be pivotal to a user’s experience like packet loss and latency. Operators’ successes with new technology rollouts will be critical to keep connections reliable, uncongested, and accessible – especially as people continue to work and play from home.“

The full report is available online here.