India has been rising up the ranks pretty fast in the Ookla's Speedtest Global Index for median mobile download speeds. Back in September 2022, India was at the 188th position in the rank of countries with a median mobile download speed of 13.87 Mbps. A year later, post the launch of 5G networks, India stands in the 43rd rank (up 4 spots month over month) with a median mobile download speed of 54.05 Mbps. As 5G penetrates more parts of the country, India will only see its rank going up in the coming months.
5G has been the key difference in enabling India to rise in the ranks. With time, other countries would also rise up as they go ahead with the 5G launch. In India, several million customers are now regularly using 5G of Airtel and Jio. Reliance Jio is offering 5G SA while Airtel is offering 5G NSA to customers.
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Compared to the top country in the list, which is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), India is still quite far behind. The median mobile download speed for the UAE is 211.58 Mbps. So there's still quite a difference India has to cover before it can reach the number one rank. But for a country such as India, coverage would be a bigger challenge than just offering faster download speeds.
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Because the population is widely distributed across the nation, telcos have to spend a lot of money on infrastructure to offer network coverage. India would also witness faster median download speeds for mobile once the other telecom operators including Vodafone Idea (Vi) and BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) also launch their next-gen mobile networks. Vi is trying to figure out its fundraising plans to be able to launch 5G while BSNL has already started rolling out homegrown 4G for consumers.
