Telus and Bell were ranked as “Global Leaders” in mobile network download experience by independent mobile network analyst Opensignal.

Opensignal’s sixth Global Mobile Network Experience Awards include analysis of multiple network providers across the globe over from July 1 to Dec. 27, 2024. The company then awards providers with ‘Global Winner’ or ‘Global Leader’ based on how the experience stacks up globally.

For the first time, Opensignal included a Reliability Experience metric measuring the ability of users to connect to and complete basic tasks successfully over an operator’s network. Rogers was the only Canadian provider to rank for this metric, though it didn’t perform well enough to win an award.

The report overall includes a mixture of speed-based measurements like download and upload speed along with Opensignal’s experiential metrics that focus on things like video quality and gaming.

Canadian providers were grouped with our providers serving large land areas, which Opensignal defines as serving a land area of over 200,000sq. km. That includes providers in Japan, the U.S., India, Norway, Finland, and Australia.

U.S. carrier T-Mobile took the top spot for download speed, named 2025’s ‘Global Winner.’ Bell and Telus both placed as Global Leaders for download speed, though they placed 10th and 11th, respectively, in the top 20 large land area providers.

T-Mobile led the download speed chart with an impressive 152.5Mbps average download speed. Only one other large land area provider posted average download speeds above 100Mbps — Norway’s Telenor. Telus came in with 73.3Mbps and Bell trailed slightly with 73Mbps.

Although Bell and Telus won awards for download speed, Canadian providers struggled to break through in other categories. No Canadian providers won awards for other metrics like upload speed, reliability, or experiential categories like video, gaming and voice. However, Rogers managed to break into the top 20 for reliability and video experience but didn’t rank highly enough to win awards.

Norway’s Telenor placed first in average upload speed with 19.3Mbps. T-Mobile was the only North American provider to place in the top 20 for upload speeds with a score of 14Mbps.

Looking at video experience, Rogers scored 69.6 out of 100 for video experience, landing it in 18th place among other large land area providers.

No Canadian providers placed in the top 20 for games or voice experience. Rogers, however, also made it into the top 20 for reliability. Again, the company didn’t rank high enough to win an award, but it placed 17th with a reliability ranking of 898 on a scale of 100-1,000.

Overall, it’s quite interesting to see how Canadian wireless providers stack up on the global stage. Canadian telecoms like to claim they have world-class networks, but increasingly, data from companies like Opensignal suggests Canadian wireless networks are lagging behind.

The full report is available on Opensignal’s website.