Infographic – Countries with Fastest Mobile Internet

Click on image for full-size view (Statista.com)

15 Dec. 2018. At Science & Enterprise, we’ve devoted a good deal of space to the role of smartphones and other mobile devices in scientific pursuits, particularly in health care. As the examples listed below from just this month indicate, smartphones with apps and hardware attachments can perform tasks that once required large-scale expensive equipment. And the data from those apps can be sent to physicians, stored in electronic medical records, or collected in the cloud for analysis later on with machine learning algorithms.

All of these technological advances assume our mobile devices are connected to networks with the speed and capacity needed for these data transfers. As the chart above indicates, those networks vary considerably in speed from one country to the next. Our friends at Statista compiled these data from their own report showing the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Iceland leading the world with average download speeds for mobile devices exceeding 67 megabits per second. Following are 5 other countries — Singapore, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, and United Arab Emirates — that report average mobile download speeds of 53 to 57 megabits per second.

The U.S. ranks 43rd on the list at 30.5 megabits per second, with Germany, Spain, and France not doing much better. These speeds and maybe the rankings are expected to change as 5G service gets rolled out. But until then, the fastest mobile speeds in the U.S. are offered by T-Mobile and Verizon, according to a report in July 2018 from Speedtest.net.

More from Science & Enterprise:

• Mobile App, Start-Up Find Designated Drivers
• FDA Clears Mobile App for Opioid Use Disorder
• Mount Sinai, Sanofi, Sema4 Partner on Long-Term Asthma Study

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