OpenSignal has released a report on Thursday looking at the state of LTE coverage and speeds around the world, revealing that, contrary to what you might expect, not all LTE networks perform comparably. While 4G is a convenient term for consumers to get their heads around, the performance of networks being rolled out in different countries is wildly variable, with some operators actually showing overall declines in 4G download speeds in the last year. For example, the data (covering the second half of 2013) shows that in the US, 4G download speeds have dropped from an average of 9.6Mbps in the second half of 2012 to 6.5Mbps for 2013 – a decline of more than 30 percent. No particular operator seems to be at fault of dragging the average down either; the report notes that “the USA networks uniformly perform poorly for speed – with Metro PCS recording the slowest speeds of all eligible networks”.