Tests of mobile phone service in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal show it is faster and more reliable on average than service in cities in the United States or the United Kingdom, according to a report released today by the U.S.-based research company RootMetrics.

“Overall … in the markets that we studied, the mobile performance (in Canada) is far superior on average to what we’re seeing in the U.S. or the U.K.,” said Annette Hamilton, market director at RootMetrics, which tested the performance of Bell, Rogers and Telus, Wind Mobile and Videotron. “Your speeds are faster, your reliability is better.”

In the urban centres it tested, Canadian pricing was lower than comparable centres in the U.S., although not necessarily than in the U.K., Hamilton said.

The report found the average cost per month for a Vancouver subscriber is $93, compared to $109 in Seattle and $58 in Liverpool. Those prices exclude taxes and are based on a Wall Communications Inc. report prepared for the CRTC and released last March.

RootMetrics tries to emulate the consumer experience by buying phones at carrier stores and testing them at various hours and locations, both inside and while driving. It measures such metrics as data upload and download speeds, the length of time it takes for texts to be delivered, dropped calls and other factors that make up the overall network performance.

In Vancouver, Rogers topped the testing, narrowly pulling ahead of Telus and Bell because of what RootMetrics termed a “3G sticky” issue that kept the service on 3G (an earlier wireless transmission standard) more than expected, even though both carriers have the faster speed LTE (Long-Term Evolution, also called 4G) available.

Increased demand for cellular service could account for what RootMetrics found to be service slippages since it last tested in 2013.

“In fact, we connected to their LTE networks less often during this visit than in our 2013 testing of Vancouver,” the report said. “Important take-away: Those LTE speeds don’t do much good if you can’t access the network.”

Hamilton said congestion factors into the testing.

“If there are congestion issues we will pick that up,” she said.

“In Vancouver in particular for this report we found there was an issue with LTE stickiness — we had a hard time getting on LTE and staying on LTE; we kept getting bumped back to 3G.

“For Vancouver that affected the results in a pretty significant way.”

Hamilton said RootMetrics has seen similar problems in the U.K., where it turned out to be attributable to a software incompatibility issue with one of the major carriers.

The company conducted 21,443 tests with 29 indoor locations in Vancouver and 1,351 kilometres driven.

Both Telus and Bell outscored Rogers in the Toronto market, with Bell first or tied for first in RootMetrics’ six performance categories and Telus first or tied for first in five categories.

Wind had the lowest scores among the carriers tested in Vancouver. Rogers download data speed was close to 20 times faster than Wind and Wind has more data and call failures than the other carriers.

However, Wind service is considerably lower priced on average than the major carriers.

“Wind is in a category all by itself,” said Hamilton.

Hamilton said she speculates that Wind has a lower cost structure and “is probably an excellent choice for some people depending on where they are.”

Montreal has the top performing networks with every network getting scores of 95 and above in every performance category.

That city has the fastest download speed ever recorded in RootMetrics testing, at 47.3 megabits per second (mbps). The median download speed for Rogers in Vancouver was 44.43 mbps; for Telus it was 14.8, Bell was 16.98 and Wind was 2.27 mbps.

To put that in some perspective, the average mobile web pages uses one megabyte of data. To download one megabyte in one second would take a connection of 8 mbps.

gshaw@vancouversun.com

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