Airtel offers fastest 4G, Reliance Jio LTE speeds increase as well: OpenSignal

OpenSignal, a third-party platform that tracks coverage and performance of mobile networks, on Thursday published a new report that reveals Airtel offers the fastest 4G and 3G speeds. OpenSignal reports an average of LTE download speeds at 9.2 Mbps and 3G downloads at 3.6 Mbps for Airtel. It also points out a spike in average download speeds on the Reliance Jio network.

In terms of average 4G download speed, Airtel dominated the market between June 1 and August 31. Vodafone and Idea grabbed the second and third spot respectively. Reliance Jio stood at the fourth spot with average speed of 5.81 Mbps. On parameters of overall speed, which combines both 3G and 4G, Airtel and state-run telecom operator BSNL grabbed the top spots.

OpenSignal gives a special mention of Reliance Jio, which had fared poorly in its first State of Mobile Networks report.

"Jio's average 4G download speed result climbed from 3.9 Mbps to 5.8 Mbps — an astonishing 49% increase. As the free-data period concluded, something clearly happened to ease the congestion on Jio's network," OpenSignal says in its report.

"A likely explanation is that Jio customers began restricting their data usage once they found themselves paying for the gigabytes they consumed, though network upgrades or customer losses could also explain the shift in speeds," it further explains.

The platform further says that the 4G coverage was growing in the country. According to OpenSignal, all four operators saw increase in LTE availability by 2% as compared the last six months. Idea and Jio, however, saw the maximum increase in their LTE coverage in the country.

In our last India report, only a single operator had 4G availability greater than 60%. Now three of India's four nationwide 4G operators have surpassed that benchmark. What this means is access to 4G services is on the rise in India as consumers can link to 4G networks more often," it said.

OpenSignal uses data collected from consumer devices and measures networks under conditions of normal usage. The platform relies on the customers who have downloaded the OpenSignal app. For this particular report, 7,369,029,252 datapoints were collected from 708,504 users during the period between June 1 and Aug 31, 2017.