Airtel ahead of competition in 4G download speeds: Report

A new report by wireless mapping company Open Signal has claimed that Bharti Airtel has topped the 3G and 4G speed networks as well as overall download speeds. As per the report, Reliance Jio was the closest competition to Airtel in overall speed due to its high level of 4G access. The report says that while Jio was able to deliver typical everyday download speeds of 5.1 Mbps, Bharti Airtel delivered 6 Mbps.

While Airtel has topped in the speed, Reliance Jio is much ahead of its key rivals in 4G availability beating the three— Airtel, Vodafone and Idea by at least 27% points in measurements. "Jio has continued to dominate our 4G availability metric as our testers were able to access an LTE signal 96.4% of the time. Such a score is exceptional, reflecting Jio's commitment to build out a 4G-only network without 3G mobile data services to fall back on. What's more, Jio's impressive LTE reach is only improving, though incrementally," said the report.

As far as Idea and Vodafone are concerned, these telecom operators were able to perform better in some of the regions. In terms of 4G speeds, Idea was at the top position in West and East Uttar Pradesh and Vodafone dominated in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

The report also shed some light on the 4G speeds on the country. It said, "While India is making big leaps forward in 4G availability, we can't say the same thing about 4G speed. There was very little change in our speed metrics since our last report. Our results show Airtel's 4G speeds ticked up incrementally, while the other three operators -- Jio, Idea and Vodafone -- saw their speeds fall off slightly since our last report. Our LTE speed rankings, though, remained the same. Airtel won the 4G speed crown with an average download of 9.3 Mbps, but even the best LTE speed score in India was well below the global 4G download average of 16.9 Mbps recorded in our State of LTE report. In that same report we found India ranked last of the 88 countries analysed in 4G speed.”

OpenSignal’s findings were based on a 736,571 devices test from a period ranging from December 1, 2017 to February 28, 2018.