India has a Decent 4G LTE Coverage, But the Speeds are Unacceptable: OpenSignal Report

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India has a Decent 4G LTE Coverage, But the Speeds are Unacceptable: OpenSignal Report

India is standing at 15th position in the global 4G availability list released by OpenSingal. The OpenSignal’s State of LTE report states that India’s has 81.6 percent of LTE coverage, up from 71.6 percent in the last quarter and 24th rank last quarter. OpenSignal claims that the sudden leap in the overall coverage of India is due to the newcomer Reliance Jio.

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Out of the 75 countries where OpenSignal ran its report, India is in 15th position, while South Korea acquires the top position with 96.38 percent LTE coverage. India shot up our LTE availability rankings, reflecting a rare instance in which a single operator can have an outsized impact on a mobile market in just a short time. Jio’s nationwide 4G launch in September attracted 100 million LTE subscribers, making 4G services far more accessible in India but at the expense of lower average speeds.” says the report.

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As said earlier, Reliance Jio is the chief architect of India’ sudden rise in the rankings. “Most of that improvement can be attributed to a single operator: Reliance Jio. In our most recent India report, we measured Jio’s 4G availability at more than 90%, while the other major operators all fell below 60% availability in our tests,” said OpenSignal in the report.

While Reliance Jio solves the LTE coverage issue, the operator is not able to increase India’s ranking in the LTE speed segment though. OpenSignal says “But while signals may be plentiful in India, capacity isn’t. India has some of the slowest LTE speeds in the world.”

India’s average LTE speed is 5.14 Mbps and is standing in the 74th position in the list. The only country below India is Costa Rica with the same average LTE speed of 5.14 Mbps. The average LTE download speed of India has dropped from 6.1 Mbps from last quarter, which is a huge letdown.

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The LTE download speed chart is led by Singapore with 45.62 Mbps average speed. Only four countries across the world have average LTE speed more than 40 Mbps- Singapore, South Korea, Hungary, and Norway, while 45 countries appeared with speed more than 20 Mbps in the list.

“It’s been six months since OpenSignal published its last State of LTE report, and in those half-dozen months, the world’s 4G players haven’t been idle. Operators around the world have been expanding and upgrading their 4G infrastructures, adding more LTE customers and in some cases launching their first 4G services. While the usual suspects still dominate our rankings in LTE speed and availability, just below the top tier we see several interesting trends. The Jio-inspired 4G revolution in India has sent that country rocketing up our availability charts. Eastern Europe has emerged as a hotbed for powerful LTE connections. And several countries in Western Europe have started shedding their reputation for limited 4G reach” explains the report.

For the OpenSignal State of LTE report, the firm has parsed more than 19 billion measurements collected by 558,260 smartphone and smart device users to compare 4G speed and availability in 75 countries. While more than 75 countries have LTE services today, OpenSignal chose to include the countries for which they had enough data to provide a meaningful analysis.

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