Jio tops in LTE coverage rankings with Idea Cellular in second and Bharti Airtel in third positions in India in the first half of 2016, according to a report.
Aircel has the lowest LTE coverage. While this is not a sign of how broad LTE coverage is, it is a sign that Airtel and Idea subscribers have a higher chance of using an HSPA-Plus, HSPA or 3G network instead of LTE.
Airtel tops the rankings in performance across 2G, 3G, HSPA, and LTE.
Jio, which launched in 2016, is slightly slower than Airtel, but offers consistency, suggesting that it provides a more uniform experience for its users.
Jio ranks first in coverage metric.
Airtel is the fastest carrier across the board — for all networks (2G, 3G, HSPA, and LTE). In LTE, Airtel is 1st (15 percent faster than Tata Docomo) followed by Aircel and Reliance in 3rd and 4th, and BSNL and Jio in 5th and 6th.
In 3G, Airtel network is 24 percent faster than Vodafone and 40 percent faster than 3rd ranked Tata Docomo. Given that HSPA is the most dominant network technology in the Indian market, Airtel and Vodafone emerge as the best carriers (for now) in India.
Airtel and Tata Docomo are definitive performance leaders in 3G, averaging about 300ms-400ms faster when downloading a 40KB image.
Aircel, Vodafone and BSNL are ranked as 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively. Overall, there is a 20 percent bump in speed from 3G to HSPA and 100 percent increase from HSPA to LTE.
Jio is the Most Consistent in Performance
Reliance Jio has the smallest variability index at 1.6 across all networks (3G, HSPA, HSPA-Plus and LTE). Jio users experience about 60 percent better performance than average Jio users. The gap is bigger for Airtel, Tata Docomo and Vodafone at 70 percent. Idea is the most variable carrier, with a variability index of 2.2.
Airtel Has the Best Network Quality
Airtel network is the best in LTE and HSPA. Reliance is second in LTE with 17ms, BSNL is third with 21ms slower response times. All measurements are for 75 percent of users. In general, it takes devices about 100ms to access a network.
In HSPA, Airtel tops charts with 107ms, Tata Docomo is second with 113ms, and Reliance is third with 125ms. In LTE, Airtel, Reliance and Jio are on the top right, indicating networks of both high quality and high performance.
Twin Prime, a provider of mobile data delivery optimization software, shared the State of Mobile performance report for H1 2016.
The report is based on Twin Prime’s analysis of over 6 billion data points collection from 600 apps with traffic across US, India, Europe and South East Asia. The company tracked more than 1500 different network operators to measure their performance over 2G, 3G, HSPA, HSPA-Plus, LTE and WiFi.
Twin Prime said these are live performance numbers as experienced by mobile users in India. Static files, such as images, provide a good proxy of network performance, since the backend serving the images has to perform a simple memory lookup.
