Singapore edged out South Korea to have the world’s fastest LTE download speeds, with its download rate averaging 45.9Mb/s, according to a report by OpenSignal.

Number two South Korea’s average speed was 45.8Mb/s, while New Zealand was fifth with an average speed of 34.9Mb/s. Just three Asian countries were in the top ten.

In OpenSignal’s report on 3G and 4G speeds in August, Asia had three countries in the top five ranking, with South Korea on top.

Indonesia, the Philippines and India were near the bottom of the ranking of 80 countries, with average LTE speeds of 8.8Mb/s, 7.3Mb/s and 6.4Mb/ respectively.

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South Korea was number one in terms of 4G availability, with users able to connect to an LTE network 95.7 per cent of the time. Japan was second (92 per cent), Hong Kong fourth (84.5 per cent) and Singapore sixth (82.6 per cent).

The Philippines was near the bottom with LTE available 44.8 per cent of the time, while Sri Lanka was last with a score of 40.3 per cent.

The wireless coverage mapping firm noted that while several countries outperformed in both 4G speed and availability, a high score in one category didn’t necessarily mean a high score in the other. It found several countries in various stages of development with impressive speeds but low 4G accessibility, and vice versa.

Although most countries had LTE speeds well over 20Mb/s, the relatively slow connections of some of the largest countries in the world brought down the global average to 17.4Mb/s, the firm said.

The LTE report drew on 17 billion measurements collected from a half million OpenSignal 4G users.