OpenSignal, the UK-based private firm revealed that Airtel is the fastest mobile network in India with an average download speed of 6.15Mbps in its State of Mobile Networks India 2017 report.
Bharti Airtel managed to secure the top position in both the 4G as well as 3G download speed categories. According to the report, the telco registered average 3G download speeds of 4.77Mbps while the 4G speeds recorded 11.53Mbps. OpenSignal’s report further added that Airtel’s LTE download speeds were “3 Mbps faster than the results we measured on its nearest rivals Vodafone and and Idea.”
At 8.59Mbps and 8.34Mbps Vodafone and Idea Cellular (respectively) were at the second and third positions as far as the 4G LTE download speeds were concerned.
Just yesterday, TRAI’s average download speed results for March 2017 revealed that Reliance Jio offered the fastest download speeds in the country at 16.48Mbps. Whereas, Bharti Airtel was offering download speeds of only 7.66Mbps.
Clearly, there’s a huge difference between OpenSignal and TRAI’s results. This could be attributed to various factors like the sample size of the survey and the like.
OpenSignal claims that it has collected the information from 1.3 billion data points covering 93,464 users from December 2016 to February 2017. TRAI, on the flip side, collects the data from folks using its MySpeed app. To put it under context, TRAI’s MySpeed app currently has over 1 million downloads on the Play Store.
Reliance Jio bagged the best network availability award in OpenSignal’s reports. “Our testers on Jio's network were able to find a 4G signal 91.6% of the time, an exceptional availability measurement by any global standard. In comparison, no other Indian operator scored higher than 60% in our availability tests,” the UK-based firm said.
In addition, the firm has also revealed that the 4G speeds in India are still on the lower side of the spectrum when compared globally. “In our speed analysis, all of India's operators fell well short of the 17.4 Mbps global average for 4G download speed.” This is despite the massive competition going on in the 4G LTE space in the country.
With a latency of 54.3 milliseconds on 4G and 83.7 milliseconds on 3G, Vodafone topped the latency segment. For the uninitiated, latency is nothing but the time taken for a packet to travel from one node to the other. It is measured in terms of milliseconds.
