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National Parks With Fast Mobile Phone Service

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By Kurt Repanshek - May 25th, 2021
A look at national parks with fast Wi-Fi speeds/Ookla

A look at national parks with fast mobile speeds/Ookla

Editor's note: This corrects that these are mobile download speeds, not WiFi.

If you're hoping to mix pleasure with work during your national park escape, there are some parks where you definitely shouldn't expect powerful mobile service for downloading or uploading information. Sequoia National Park in California just might be the worst "hot spot," with a median download of 1.43 megabytes per second and a median upload of 1.38 Mbps.

Only slightly better is Yellowstone National Park, where the median download time measured by Ookla, a global leader in internet analysis, was 1.76 Mbps and the median upload a sluggish 0.50 Mbps.

Not terribly surprising is that the fastest download and upload times to be found in the National Park System are from parks close to urban areas. Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis had a ripping 84.62 Mbps median download time, according to Ookla, and a 31.11 Mbps median upload time.

Not far behind Gateway was Saguaro National Park at Tuscon, Arizona, with its median download speed of 82.25 Mbps. However, Saguaro's median upload speed was a more pedestrian 6.18 Mbps.

Where to find good Wi-Fi in the National Park System/Ookla

"We can’t say if Canadians are better at logging off while discovering national parks than folks in the U.S. or if service is harder to get, but there were far fewer parks with sufficient data to report on in Canada," the company reported. "As a result, the spread in download performance was not nearly as wide for Canadian national parks as it was for those in the U.S. And, unlike the U.S., all of the Canadian national parks that made our list were in more remote locations.

"Waterton Lakes National Park had the fastest median download speed during the period. Jasper and Banff were second and third, respectively. Riding Mountain National Park had the slowest median download speed, followed by Yoho National Park and Saguenay-St. Lawrence National Park. For comparison, the median mobile download speed in all of Canada was 66.90 Mbps during Q1 2021."

Canada has a mix of download/upload internet speeds/Ookla

"5G offers the fastest speeds for travelers looking to make arrangements on the go or tether to a laptop to fit in a few hours of remote work. Data from Android users with 5G-capable phones during Q3 2020-Q1 2021 showed 36 national parks in the U.S. and two in Canada with sufficient samples to confirm 5G at least somewhere in the park," the data mining company said.

US national parks with 5G service/Ookla

Canadian national parks with 5G service/Ookla

The folks at Ookla point out that "median performance only applies where you can actually get a signal." To view maps of the Canadian and U.S. national parks with the fastest and slowest speeds and the highest and lowest 4G availability from their lists to show how varied that coverage can be in the parks, head over here.

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Comments

Submitted by Peter Jones on June 1, 2021 - 1:53pm.

Where at Grand Canyon National Park did you measure 5G signals?
As the Telecom Specialist for that Park, I haven't been made aware 5G is even capable out here.


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