If you thought that Bell, as owners of the vast majority of mobile data physical infrastructure in the province, is the quickest carrier, you’d be wrong.
During its sixth annual test of the fastest mobile networks in Canada conducted this summer, PCMag determined Telus, which uses Bell’s towers, is the fleeter provider in urban and rural parts of the province.
“We didn't come to Newfoundland expecting to find screaming-fast LTE speeds, but we did,” lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan wrote in a story published at pcmag.com earlier this week.
Segan’s team ran speed tests in 18 locations on the Northeast Avalon and two more in Gander and in Trinity.
In St. John’s, where Bell has two 20 megahertz (MHz) bands of spectrum that it has combined into a 40MHz channel, the team was able to record multiple speed tests of 500-megabits per second or more.
“As we saw in some other metro areas, our Telus phone got slightly faster speeds than our Bell phone, even though Telus' latencies were slightly longer; that may have to do with fewer customers in Newfoundland using Telus, or other factors we don't understand,” Segan wrote.
Telus recorded higher average download speed and maximum and average upload speed.
Rogers, which doesn’t have a 40Mhz channel of its own, scored significantly worse. The carrier’s download and upload averages were just a third or lower than that of Bell’s or Telus.
The results, while slower all around, were much the same in Gander and Trinity. Bell delivered the fastest maximum download and upload speeds, but Telus maintained the highest average downloads. Rogers, meanwhile, wasn’t included, as service ends north of Clarenville.
Eastlink, new to the province’s wireless service provider landscape, opted not to participate, and there wasn’t enough Eastlink data in the Speedtest Intelligence crowdsourced database for PCMag to judge its performance.
