Which country has the fastest 4G service? Hint, the U.S. is eighth

In the U.K., OpenSignal is a company that uses crowdsourcing through its Android app to collect data. Thanks to this data, we can tell you that Sweden, the first country to launch LTE service, has the fastest 4G network with an average download speed of 22.1 Mbps. Right behind is Hong Kong with an average download speed of 19.6 Mbps. Denmark and Canada are third and fourth with average download speeds of 19.1 Mbps and 18.1 Mbps. What about the U.S.? With an average download speed of 9.6 Mbps, the States finished 8th.

Some of the reason for the low U.S. score is that some carriers in the U.S. built their 4G networks around 20MHz for their initial rollouts (Verizon and AT&T) and the LTE networks for Sprint and MetroPCS were built around 10MHz. Meanwhile, the European operators used 40MHz when they built their 4G LTE pipelines.

source: OpenSignal via GIGaom