South Korea’s operators provide the widest 4G coverage and download speeds of more than 29Mb/s, while New Zealand offers users the world’s fastest LTE speed of 36Mb/s.

South Korea topped OpenSignal’s Q3 survey of smartphone users with near ubiquitous coverage of 97 per cent. The firm, which collected data from more than 325,000 smartphone users worldwide via an app, found that Korea’s LG Uplus’ 4G network was available 99.6 per cent of the time.

Singapore’s three major players beat the South Korea operators in speed (second after New Zealand with a 33Mb/s downlink rate) but were unable to match their Asian peer’s network availability. StarHub had the world’s fastest LTE network with a download speed of 38Mb/s.

Four of the world’s top five territories with the highest LTE availability were in Asia. After South Korea, Japan was number 2 (89 per cent), Hong Kong third (85 per cent) and Singapore fifth (82 per cent).

Japan’s operators provided excellent coverage but average speeds (ranked 35th at 14Mb/s).

The US was tenth with 78 per cent LTE coverage and China was 12th with 76 per cent availability. But China, Hong Kong and the US all had average to slow LTE speeds of 13, 11 and 10Mb/s respectively.

OpenSignal said it is starting to see global LTE coverage improve steadily, with 50 countries having time-on-LTE percentages greater than 50 per cent in Q3, up from 37 in Q2.

It said that 140 counties have at least one commercial LTE network.