Reliance Jio leads in 4G availability in India, Airtel tops 4G download speed: OpenSignal

Reliance Jio remained the closest contender in overall speed due to its high level of 4G access.

New Delhi: When it comes to 4G availability in the country, Reliance Jio still leads the pack, a survey by London-based wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal revealed on Wednesday.

According to OpenSignal's "State of LTE" report, Airtel has toped the 4G download speed. Jio remained the closest contender in overall speed due to its high level of 4G access. It was able to deliver typical everyday download speeds of 5.1 Mbps in OpenSignal's, compared to Airtel's 6 Mbps.

While Airtel dominated in 4G speed nationally, Idea bested its larger competitor in both west and east Uttar Pradesh and Vodafone won regional 4G speed awards in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the report said.

For this particular report, 8,412,910,035 datapoints were collected from 736,571 users during the period: December 1, 2017 - February 28, 2018, the survey said.

When it comes to nationwide 4G availability, the survey saw huge jumps in metric from Airtel, Idea and Vodafone. “In our last report none of these three operators had an LTE availability score higher than 65%. Now all three 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 percentage points to 66.8% in our measurements,” it said.

Though Airtel won the 4G speed crown, the survey found that even the best LTE speed score in India was well below the global 4G download average of 16.9 Mbps. India ranked last of the 88 countries analyzed in 4G speed.

“In Kerala, Kolkata, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, all of the 4G operators analyzed exceeded their national averages, producing speeds notably faster than in the rest of the country. In Madhya Pradesh, we recorded the fastest average speed of all of the 18 regions: 14.4 Mbps on Airtel's network. In Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh we saw the opposite trend in our data as all operators' 4G speed averages fell short of their national averages. The slowest average speed we recorded across the 18 circles was 3.2 Mbps on Vodafone's network in west Uttar Pradesh,” OpenSignal said.