India has witnessed 4G explosion during 2017 thanks to the revolutionary launch of cheap 4G/LTE services by Reliance Jio, says a recent report from OpenSignal.
Barely 6 months in the market, Jio already secured its lead in the 4G availability race with our users able to access its LTE signals 91.6 percent of the time as per OpenSignal’s April data. No other mobile operator managed to score higher than 60 percent in these tests.
Six months later, there was significant improvements in availability across all major operators, with Vodafone and Airtel both increasing their scores by 2 percentage points, while Idea saw scores jumping by 4 percentage points. But those improvements weren’t enough to close the gap with Jio, which was able to provide an LTE signal at a jaw-dropping 95.6 percent of the time in the same test period, the report says.
India’s current mobile data subscriber penetration stands at 40 percent, expected to double to 80 percent by 2022 according to Crisil’s predictions. But while lower generation wireless technologies are still occupying a fair share of the mobile data space, LTE services have taken the leading role in the unprecedented increase of data users in the past year, according to the report.
The emergence of 4G brought with it free voice calls and low-cost data plans leading to a big boost in data usage. As more consumers received access to 4G connections, a new wealth of applications requiring fast speeds opened up to them, further driving up data consumption.
During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI. The growth is most visible when checking the numbers from a year ago, when 4G data usage stood at a mere 8,050 TBs; that’s a 500-fold increase.
But being the second largest telecom market in the world with a booming 4G scene means India has its fair share of hurdles it needs to address to continue its upward trajectory.
Despite the sudden surge in LTE subscription, 4G speeds in India is not satisfactory, the report says. India occupied the lowest spot among the 77 countries that OpenSignal examined, with average download speeds of 6.1 Mbps, over 10 Mbps lower than the global average.
In OpenSignal’s April report Jio had the slowest 4G speed in, but as soon as Jio’s freebie plan ended in April 2017, there was an astonishing 50 percent increase in their speed (from 3.9 Mbps to 5.8 Mbps) over the course of six months, which still placed Jio at the lowest end of the speed spectrum but with a significantly narrower gap.
2018 will see India gradually move away from being a developing 4G country; overcoming the hiccups necessary to become a full-grown 4G power, according to OpenSignal.
editor@telecomlead.com
