


Of these countries, only Oman did not have commercially-available 5G until 2021. Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain formed a tight group at the bottom of the rankings with median download speeds of 42.52 Mbps, 37.52 Mbps and 36.76 Mbps, respectively, during Q1 2021. Qatar was second with 90.92 Mbps during Q1 2021 and Saudi Arabia was third (67.61 Mbps). United Arab Emirates (UAE) consistently had the fastest median download speed over mobile, with 100.99 Mbps during Q1 2021. There was a wide range of median mobile speeds across the GCC over the past year, despite 5G presence in nearly all of the countries. UAE has fastest mobile speeds in GCC, Saudi Arabia third This article looks at mobile speeds and 5G adoption in GCC countries and then closely examines Saudi mobile performance, including information on fastest providers, time spent on 5G and how the new spectrum could improve performance. It’s good company to be in, but having such technologically advanced neighbors can obscure the progress Saudi Arabia has made and how well the country is doing compared with the world. In addition, we can use the Android or iOS location services to determine a more accurate location fix.Saudi Arabia has a new plan to allocate or improve 23 GHz of spectrum to boost 5G speeds and coverage and potentially best other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), This region has been ahead of the 5G curve since early days with Qatar launching commercially available 5G in 2018 and Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates following soon after in 2019. If you're using one of our mobile apps, this process all happens in the background before you press Begin Test. (For more information, you can read our article on the full testing methodology used on .) We can then begin the full test process: measuring your ping, download speed, and upload speed. This is the server that's "closest" on the network, and usually provides the most accurate results. We then ping those nearby servers, and choose the server with the lowest result, meaning it took the shortest time for a response.

Once you press Begin Test, we take your location and determine up to five nearby servers (using spherical geometry). After loading the list of 1000+ servers and the appropriate map tiles, we can display the map of hosts on the front page. This tells us where to center the map-but more importantly, it also tells us which servers are nearby.

The first step begins before you even press the button: we look up your IP address in a GeoIP database to determine your approximate location.
