4G availability in India has increased to 81.6 percent in the first quarter of 2017 against 71.6 percent in the third quarter of 2016 – moving India to the top 20 of the 75 countries in OpenSignal’s State of LTE report.
Reliance Jio, which has added 100 million 4G subscribers during the promotion offer, was the driver for the sharp increase in 4G availability across the nation.
OpenSignal measured Jio’s 4G availability at more than 90 percent, while the other major operators fell below 60 percent availability in its tests. Jio’s launch of an LTE-only mobile network has made 4G service much more accessible throughout the country to millions of subscribers.
ALSO READ: OpenSignal report on LTE globally
Data usage of Jio subscribers has taxed its network capacity, driving down 4G speeds. India’s average LTE download speed was 5.1 Mbps, dropping more than a megabit per second in six months time. 4G download speeds in India are only marginally faster than the average global 3G connection speed of 4.4 Mbps.
India is in the bottom of the OpenSignal chart for 4G speed, just above Costa Rica.
The report does not talk about the 4G availability and 4G speed offered by telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance Communications, etc.
4G speed globally
The countries with the fastest 4G speeds tend to be the ones that have built LTE-Advanced networks and have a large proportion of LTE-Advanced capable devices.
Singapore, South Korea, Hungary, Norway, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Croatia, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Australia, Denmark, Lithuania, Canada, Serbia, Belgium, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates and Austria are the top countries for 4G speed.
4G speed in Singapore was 45.62 Mbps. On the other hand, Indian operators offer an average 4G speed of 5.14 Mbps to its mobile Internet customers. India is home to telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone India, Reliance Jio, BSNL, among others.
Many of LTE’s earliest adopters dominate the speed list. Singapore, South Korea, Australia, Norway and the Netherlands have had the better part of six years to fully deploy, optimize and upgrade their original LTE networks. The U.S. and Japan lag well behind their 4G peers.
4G availability globally
South Korea tops the OpenSignal survey based on 4G availability with 96.38 percent. India scored 81.56 percent in 4G availability.
Japan, Norway, United States of America, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Lithuania, Sweden, Hungary, Taiwan, Finland, Kuwait, Singapore, Estonia, India, Qatar, Canada, Czech Republic, Australia, Latvia, Denmark, Thailand, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates are some of the top 4G nations in terms of 4G availability.
Rather than measure geographic coverage, OpenSignal’s availability metric tracks the proportion of time users have access to a particular network.
Two of the first countries to adopt 4G, the U.S. and Hong Kong, have built extensive LTE footprints, but support average speeds lower than the global average. Japan’s LTE infrastructure has the furthest reach of any country outside of South Korea, but its average download speed is the same as Ecuador’s, a country with half of Japan’s 4G reach.
OpenSignal said it collects data from consumer smartphones and recorded under conditions of normal usage. OpenSignal takes measurements from millions of smartphones owned by regular people who have downloaded OpenSignal’s apps.
OpenSignal collected 19,556,514,365 datapoints from 558,260 users during January – March 2017 for preparing the report.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
