OpenSignal today released its State of Mobile Networks: India (April 2018) edition, in which it stated that Reliance Jio's 4G LTE network reach is growing at a rapid pace in the country, but it isn't able to match market leader Bharti Airtel in the 4G speeds department. OpenSignal states that the Indian telcos are focusing on growing LTE's reach rather than injecting more speed into the 4G services. Over the last months, every major operator's 4G availability increased, and all the major telcos (Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular) has now crossed the 65% LTE availability threshold, and three of them are now nearing the 70% mark.
However, the 4G LTE data speeds are still stagnant in the country. Reliance Jio is not able to convert the excellent LTE availability into the 4G download speeds, as a result, the telco registered only 5.13 Mbps average download speed. Bharti Airtel leads the 4G speed test chart with 9.31 Mbps average download speed, followed by Idea Cellular with 7.27 Mbps and Vodafone with 6.98 Mbps. Bharti Airtel is also leading the average 3G download speed chart with 2.73 Mbps and is closely followed by Vodafone, Idea and BSNL with 2.27 Mbps, 2.34 Mbps and 2.19 Mbps average download speed.
This is OpenSignal's third State of Mobile Networks report for India for which the firm parsed billions of measurements collected by 736,571 smart device users in the months of December, January and February. As stated, Jio continued to dominate the 4G availability segment in India as users of Jio were able to access an LTE signal 96.4% of the time. In the OpenSignal's October report, Jio's 4G availability stood at 95.6%.
In the October report, none of the other major three telcos- Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular had an LTE availability score higher than 65%. And in the April 2018 report, all the three operators have surpassed that bar and two of them, Idea and Vodafone are closing in on the 70% mark. Airtel demonstrated by far the biggest improvement in 4G reach, boosting its 4G availability by more than 9% points to 66.8% in the measurements. Airtel did, however, close the gap separating itself from Idea and Vodafone, both of which had 4G availability scores just over 68%.
It would be great if the telcos will be able to increase the 4G data speeds in the nation, especially Reliance Jio whose download speeds on the 4G network are unacceptable.
