A report released this week by OpenSignal, a British company which measures mobile user experience globally, says Vietnam’s 4G average download speed clocked at 20.6 Mbps, faster than the rest of Southeast Asian countries.

Singapore has the fastest download speed of mobile data in Southeast Asia and sixth globally at 47.5 Mbps.

In Southeast Asia, Laos ranked 52nd (17.1 Mbps), Brunei 55th (16.4 Mbps), Myanmar 56th (16.4 Mbps); Malaysia 73rd (11 Mbps); Indonesia 80th (9.9 Mbps); Thailand at 81st (9.2 Mbps); the Philippines 83rd (8.5 Mbps) and Cambodia at 87th (8 Mbps).  

Canada’s 4G download speed is the fastest in the world at 59.6 Mbps, followed by South Korea and the Netherlands.

Vietnamese users have seen a 46.6 percent increase in their download speed over the previous year, when it was clocked at 14.1 Mbps.

The report was compiled using tests and results gathered from 43.3 million mobile devices around the world, with over 87 million measurements between January 1 and March this year.     

Vietnam’s 4G networks performed better in terms of availability than speed, ranking 36th among 100 economies, with Vietnamese users having access to 4G networks 87.9 percent of the time, higher than Laos (86.2 pct), Malaysia (84.4 pct), Brunei (83.1 pct), and the Philippines (81.5 pct), the report said.

Vietnamese telecom firms started piloting 4G, the fourth generation of broadband cellular network technology, succeeding 3G, in December 2015. The government plans to expand coverage to 95 percent of the population by 2020.

The telecom firms are also chasing a head start in the 5G race, with Vietnam aiming to become an early adopter of the technology. Telecom giant Viettel broadcast from its network of 5G base transceiver stations in Ho Chi Minh City last September for the first time.

Around 64 million people, or over half the country's population, are online.