The State of 4G in India: A big splash, but at the expense of low speed
4G coverage in India has shot up placing it at 15th spot out of 75 countries surveyed, but at the cost of lower average speed, according to a report from OpenSignal, a London-based firm which specialises in wireless coverage mapping.
India is recorded to have a 4G signal 81.6 per cent of the time in the first quarter, up from 71.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2016, mainly on the back of Reliance Jio free services. However, in parallel, India is also recorded to have dropped more than one megabit per second in the past six months due to increase in traffic.
“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,’ a statement by OpenSignal read.
The OpenSignal study analysed India’s average speed has come down to 5.14Mbps from 6.39Mbps in November last year. The observed average download speed in India is less than a third of global average speed and only marginally higher than the average global 3G download speed of 4.4Mbps, which will reportedly go down to 10Kbps for some 3G subscribers.
Singapore scored the highest in 4G speed while South Korea gained first spot in the 4G availability, in the survey.
“India is one of the most dynamic and fast-changing mobile markets. The government and other stakeholders must continue to seize the immense opportunity and climb the global rankings across all parameters, to ensure high quality and consistent mobile experience for its one billion plus mobile users," said Brendan Gill, co-founder and CEO, OpenSignal, in a statement.
