(Credit: Bob Al-Greene)
In our 10th annual Fastest Mobile Networks Canada tests, we find that after a year's stall in 2021, speeds are skyrocketing again thanks to the new "5G+" networks all the major carriers are installing. This is particularly true for Bell, our overall winner for the fastest mobile network in Canada this year:
We've been driving across Canada since 2013, when we tested the nation's first 4G LTE networks. In 2020, Canadian carriers debuted 5G, but it didn't boost performance much. Now, we're fully in the 5G era, using new airwaves released by the government at the end of last year. As we saw with T-Mobile in the US this year, that makes all the difference.
The big change between 2021 and 2022 is the launch of Bell's and Rogers' 3,500MHz networks in many cities. Bell's launch focuses on the most populated parts of southern Ontario, while we see Rogers’ new network has the biggest effect right now in British Columbia and Montreal. Bell says it will have considerably more 5G+ coverage by the end of the year, though.
Bell and Telus call the new network "5G+" while Rogers calls it "5G 3,500MHz." I'm going to go with the 5G+ moniker in this story—it's just easier—but it's all the same thing. We can't really say "mid-band 5G" because the carriers' earlier form of 5G also uses some mid-band airwaves, just not nearly as much at a time.
The new networks are upsetting long-established rules in Canadian wireless. Since 2015, Bell and Telus have traded off the win in our study, largely because together, they generally have more wireless spectrum than Rogers.
But Rogers' aggressive 5G+ buildout this year and Telus' missteps push Rogers into a second-place showing, leading it to win in Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver.
Bell wins the day overall because of the spectacular work it's done on its network in southern Ontario, and because of the strength of its network in places where we didn't see as much Rogers 5G+. Bell won 22 of our 31 tested areas, including Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton, and in our population-weighted rankings, those matter a lot. Bell also dominates in the less-urbanized provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
(Some people will probably say that we should have docked Rogers points for its total network failure in July. We didn't factor that in, but we considered it.)
Telus says it has the network, but it still doesn't have the device firmware for Android devices to access the network as of this writing. As a result, our Telus phone couldn't access 5G+. Unlike the other two carriers, Telus also now has speed caps on its plans. The 1Gbps cap for its premium plans would have eliminated the fastest speeds we saw in Hamilton, Kitchener, London, and Toronto. At the moment, neither Bell nor Rogers seems to feel a need to draw that line in the sand.
There's always been an urban/rural divide in Canadian wireless. Now there may be a big city/small city divide as well. The new 5G+ spectrum is being released by the government in phases, to let existing users move out of the bands. "Large urban population centres" came first, while "tiers with a population centre of 30,000 or more" may not be released until the end of 2023, and very rural areas not until the end of 2024.
The new 5G+ spectrum is similar to airwaves that generally have a 1-3km range here in the States, though, so it's not designed to cover large areas. For rural home internet, Bell says it's concentrating primarily on fiber, aiming to reach 900,000 more homes and businesses throughout 2022 with a focus on rural areas.
The Canadian Carrier Landscape
Three giant wireless carriers dominate Canada—Bell, Rogers, and Telus. Rogers runs its own nationwide network, while Bell and Telus mostly share radio towers. Performance can vary between Bell and Telus because their traffic takes different routes through the internet, or because of different software on their phones (as we saw this year when the Telus phones didn't have the software to handle the new 5G+ network).
Rogers had the fastest network at the start of our study in 2013, but its focus on coverage rather than performance led Bell and Telus to trade off the lead throughout the 2010s. Rogers' unified system may pay off in the era of 5G, though, as it appears to be rolling out the new 5G+ system over more cities, faster, than its competitors.
Several regional carriers offer lower rates to people in specific provinces. Sasktel has always delivered reliable, consistent coverage in Saskatchewan. Vidéotron does discount double-plays with its cable service in Quebec. Eastlink, which declined to participate in our study, has some coverage in the Atlantic provinces.
And then there's Freedom. The last carrier standing from a mid-2000s attempt by the government to nurture a nationwide competitor to the Big Three, it covers urban areas in Ontario, Alberta, and BC, but opted out of the most recent 5G auctions as its current owner, Shaw, aimed to sell it to another carrier. We'll talk about that more in a bit.
Canadian carriers also have "flanker brands" that appear to be their own thing but aren't. Fido and Chatr are Rogers, Fizz is Vidéotron, Virgin Plus and Lucky are Bell, and Koodo and Public Mobile are Telus. Flankers generally offer better prices to folks who aren't on family plans, at the cost of performance. Fido, Virgin, and Koodo are 4G-only, and Chatr, Lucky, and Public are 4G and severely throttled.
How much that matters for your performance depends on where you are. In general, 4G plans will still give you excellent performance. We didn't test 4G side by side with 5G this year, but we did get some measurements of maximum 4G speeds that show users of Fido, Virgin Plus, and Koodo aren't being choked down.
The really low-cost plans (Chatr, Lucky, and Public) are severely throttled, though, to the point where data is nearly useless. They're good for calls, texts, and basic usage like maps or audio (not video) streaming.
What Is 5G+ and How Do You Get It?
For a transformative technology, it’s a little annoying to figure out how to use the new 5G+.
MobileSyrup has a basic guide to which phones and plans can access the new spectrum. Bell and Rogers, but not Telus, have coverage maps on their sites showing 5G+. Our tests in Toronto show those maps to be roughly accurate. Unfortunately, there’s currently no status bar icon to indicate when you’re on the new network, so you’d only know it by seeing better performance.
There’s also the problem of “what use is a faster network, which just helps me hit my data cap more quickly?” No Canadian carrier offers truly unlimited high-speed data, although Bell’s 50GB is a lot. The CRTC said at the end of last year that median mobile data usage in Canada was only 5.4GB.
The whole world is still looking for the ‘killer app’ for mobile 5G. In the US, T-Mobile and Verizon have settled on wireless home internet using their new 5G capacity. The Canadian carriers have talked for a few years about telemedicine, remote education, multi-camera sports videos, remote drone operation, and industrial uses. Telus, especially, is now heavily invested in health tech. But the most obvious application at the moment is in dealing with crowds, whether it’s at the Calgary Stampede, a Raptors game, or on the campus of Dalhousie University in Halifax. More spectrum means less congestion for all those photos and videos of memorable moments.
More capacity ideally also means lower prices, an issue always on the minds of Canadians—but that isn’t happening quite yet.
5G+ Isn't Lowering Prices
In 2019, Canada saw a big drop in wireless plan prices per gig because of what appeared to be a combination of political pressure and vastly greater capacity created by advances in 4G.
5G+ definitely brings even more capacity. But so far, the 5G+ rollout doesn't appear to have improved plan prices, according to Stephen Clark, a senior writer for Canadian Telecom who studies service plans. Rather, it's being used as a premium option to drive people to more costly service plans.
"All [5G] plans are at least $10 per month more expensive, and the cheapest option usually involves some concessions, like lower max speeds or video streaming limited to SD resolutions," Clark said.
There’s still hope. The big 4G capacity boom, according to our studies, came between 2017 and 2018; new plans didn’t happen until the end of 2019. The 5G+ boom will probably take effect in 2023, leading to overall lower prices per gig in 2024.
The carriers are also keeping 5G away from their low-cost flanker brands for now. Fido, Koodo, and Virgin are all stuck on 4G.
Canadian 4G performance continues to be excellent, though, and the 5G shift will help 4G customers as well, by drawing other customers' traffic to the new 5G airwaves.
In most metro areas, we didn't run enough 4G-only tests to talk conclusively about 4G performance, but we can make some more seat-of-the-pants assessments. In Saskatchewan and Quebec, Sasktel's and Vidéotron's 4G performance is excellent and reliable, which is a vote for Vidéotron's Fizz in Quebec.
The Fastest Mobile Networks In Our Best Work-From-Home Cities
Earlier this year, we did a feature focusing on The Best Work-From-Home Cities in Canada—primarily, places where both housing and gigabit internet aren't hideously expensive. Although you should be doing most of your remote work on a fiber plan at home, being able to take a Zoom call during a jog or upload a slide deck from the riverside is a big plus for the work-from-home lifestyle, so we stopped in several places on our list during this tour.
We surveyed mobile networks in Edmonton (our #1 city for working from home), Moncton (#2), Halifax (#4), Colwood (#5), Ile-Perrot (#6), and Saint John/Quispamsis (#10). Here’s who won in each location:
Edmonton: Bell. We have more details on our Alberta page.
Moncton: Bell. We have more details on our New Brunswick page.
Halifax: Bell. We have more details on our Nova Scotia page.
Colwood, BC: Bell. The carrier ties with Rogers in the Victoria area, but Bell's performance was better specifically in our test of the western Victoria suburbs.
Ile-Perrot, QC: Rogers. Rogers dominates the Montreal area this year because it's the only carrier with the new 5G+ system. Rogers has even installed its 3,500MHz network way out here in the suburbs, and the effect is dramatic—we got five times the speed on Rogers' network that we saw with Bell and Telus on this island!
Quispamsis, NB: Bell. Our test in Quispamsis came up with absolutely mind-boggling speeds—an average of 412Mbps down on Bell, and still-very-high numbers on Rogers and Telus—so we must have been sitting in an ideal location, which happens sometimes. Bell also wins the Saint John area as a whole, though, and that was averaged over 12 test locations.
Vidéotron + Freedom = ?
The latest twist in a decade-long attempt by the government to nurture a fourth nationwide mobile carrier is the potential purchase of Freedom Wireless by Quebec-based Vidéotron.
To make a long saga short, the government auctioned airwaves in 2008 and 2015 with specific carve-outs to encourage providers who weren't Bell, Rogers, or Telus. Vidéotron, Eastlink, and Freedom (formerly WIND) rose out of those auctions, as well as failed providers Mobilicity and Public Mobile. Of the three survivors, Vidéotron is by far the strongest, leveraging its position as Quebec's dominant cable company and the only primarily French-speaking provider to reach a 22% share of Quebec residents over age 14.
We have tested Freedom and Vidéotron for the past several years. Vidéotron offers very reliable, but not very fast service with comprehensive coverage throughout the populated parts of Quebec, often for less money than the Big Three providers.
Freedom's fate is more complex. It covers major cities in AB, BC, and ON. Its coverage has expanded over the years, but it still has holes even in its focus corridors—with gaps along the way between Calgary and Edmonton, as well as between London and Windsor, and between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence River.
Vidéotron's future as a potential nationwide provider rides on its purchase of mid-band 5G spectrum throughout the country and its ability to leverage a 2021 CRTC decision on regulated roaming rates for the Big Three networks. The company can certainly build out more coverage in Freedom's existing areas—places like Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria where Freedom's existing performance would be enhanced by the mid-band 5G airwaves Vidéotron recently bought.
But Vidéotron also bought small slices of spectrum in places like Salmon Arm, BC; Barrhead, AB; and Dauphin, MB, where the company doesn't have enough airwaves for a valid network on its own. There, the combined firm could take advantage of the government offering to regulate roaming rates for carriers who own spectrum and build a few towers in an area. That way, Vidéotron/Freedom could offer service primarily on the major networks, but at a lower rate.
At least, that's the theory. We'll see if that happens in practice.
Our Testing Methodology
This year, we used a new in-house software package that tests downloads, uploads, latency, and reliability against nearby servers.
We loaded the software onto Samsung Galaxy S22 phones, selected for their excellent cellular reception and support for the new mid-band "5G+" systems. We used SIM cards provided by the carriers with truly unlimited data (no throttling, and no speed caps). However, only the Bell and Rogers phones ended up being capable of 5G+, because the firmware for the Telus phone wasn't ready at the time we tested.
We tested Bell, Freedom, Rogers, Sasktel, Telus, and Vidéotron.
We ran our drive tests during the month of August 2022. In each area, we stopped a varying number of times roughly corresponding to the relative population. Our speed results are primarily from the stationary tests, with a small proportion mixed in from tests while we were on the move around the city. Our reliability results take all tests in the city into equal account. Tests performed outside the enumerated metro areas were bundled together into a rural result by province.
Our provincial and national winners are weighted by population, as measured by CMA population in the 2021 Census. Thus, metro Toronto comprises 24% of the national score, while Halifax is just 2% of the overall score, while Moose Jaw is .01%.
We used the Google Android network APIs to assess whether a connection was on 4G or 5G; however, that didn't factor into our scoring. Unfortunately, there was no way to automatically note when we were on 5G+, as the devices don't currently have an icon to show the new network.
Our speed score is, as always, a weighted average including these components:
Which Network Is Your Best Bet?
What is the fastest carrier where you live, work, or play? Click the location links below (or the drop-down menu at the top of the page) to find out.