When it comes to unique mobile markets, you won't find a situation more interesting than Canada's. Its land mass is huge but its population is relatively small (just 35.6 million) and nearly all of it is concentrated in the country's far south, hugging the U.S. border. Yet Canada still manages to support 10 mobile operators, many of them focused on their own geographic nooks. These service providers also have managed to launch some of the most sophisticated 4G networks in the world. All three of Canada's nationwide mobile providers have embraced LTE-Advanced, but even the regional operators have launched 4G networks that are among the world's fastest.

While we do highlight some data OpenSignal collected on Canada's smaller mobile operators, this report focuses primarily on Canada's Big 3 nationwide operators — Bell, Rogers and Telus — which account for 90 percent of all mobile connections in the country. Comparing the results of a regional provider operating in a single province to those of a nationwide provider isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison. It makes more sense to treat those two classes of mobile operators separately, and we plan to delve more deeply into the regional providers in future reports.

Canada's Big 3 are all surprisingly close when it comes to matching each other’s 4G performance. In OpenSignal's tests, Telus, Bell and Rogers all averaged more than 17 Mbps, which is far above the global average of 12.6 Mbps we measured in our Q3 global LTE report. Bell, however, edged out its rivals with an average speed of 19.9 Mbps. Likewise, when it comes to availability, all three operators did well, supplying an LTE signal more than 70 percent of the time (for more details on how we calculate availability, see our methodology page). Rogers was the stand out, though, with an availability metric of 80 percent, which puts it among the world's elite when it comes to providing a reliable LTE connection. And for those times when LTE wasn't available, they had HSPA+ workhorses to fall back on. 3G speeds for all three operators averaged between 3 and 4 Mbps.

One possible reason why Canada's operators are so evenly matched is the prevalence of network-sharing agreements. Telus and Bell share towers and infrastructure with one another in their respective home territories, while Rogers has struck similar deals with many regional operators like Videotron in Quebec and MTS in Manitoba. But all of the Big 3 have been equally aggressive when it comes to pursuing new technology and adding new capacity. All three have launched LTE in multiple frequency bands, and all three are in various stages of rolling out speed-boosting LTE-Advanced enhancements. In this respect, Canada's operators are well ahead of their U.S. neighbors to the south, who are still struggling to upgrade to LTE-Advanced.

Some of the most impressive results we saw, however, came from the regional providers. Videotron and SaskTel both averaged LTE speeds greater than 27 Mbps in their respective provinces. Videotron also scored excellent marks in 4G availability in Quebec, connecting its customers to an LTE signal 78 percent of the time. We can't make direct comparisons between regional and national measurements, but it's become quite clear that Canada's smaller operators aren't sitting out the 4G race.

The final report metric we tracked, latency, will have greater significance as Canadian operators move their voice services from 2G to 4G networks. Latency, often referred to as ping, measures the round-trip time it takes for a data request to travel from your phone, through the network and back. A lower latency is crucial for real-time communications applications like video conferencing and VoIP as too much delay can make a voice or video conversation intolerable. So far only Rogers has launched voice-over-LTE services, and it happens to have the lowest latency of the three big operators, 57ms. Whether 57ms is a good or bad score depends on whom you ask. LTE was supposed to support far lower latencies — in the sub-20ms range — but practically no network in the real world is seeing that kind of network reaction time. On the other hand countries like the U.S. are already pushing ahead with VoLTE even though their average latency scores are generally higher than those of Canada's operators.

While Canadians often tire of the constant comparisons to its big neighbor to the south, in this instance the comparison is quite favorable. In our most recent global LTE report, there was a full 5 Mbps difference in speed between U.S.'s fastest network and Canada's slowest. The U.S. has a slight edge on Canada in availability, but Canadian operators still rank among the world's top tier when it comes to providing a consistent 4G signal. Frankly there's not much to criticize when it comes to the network progress of Canada's three major operators (pricing is another matter — like the U.S. Canada's consumer rates are quite high). Canada already has some of the highest performing networks in the world and they only seem to be improving.