Opensignal is out with its report on Indian telecom companies with a sample period ranging from December 1 to February 28. The report gives an insight into what to expect from India's major network providers.
The network clearly gives thumbs up to overall 4G availability but the speeds fail to impress yet again. The report by Opensignal claims that the network providers are focusing on increasing reach but download speeds have been mostly stagnant. In fact, a slight drop in 4G speeds was reported. According to the report, information was collected by 7,36,571 smart devices in the month of December, January and February.
The report stated, "All of India's major 4G providers have now crossed the 65 per cent LTE availability threshold, and three of them are now nearing the 70 per cent mark. But we saw little movement in our 4G download metrics. In fact, we tracked slight drops in LTE speeds for three operators."
When it comes to reach, Reliance Jio seems to have taken good care of the consumer, despite being the newest in the lot. In terms of 4G availability, Reliance Jio has topped the list beating other three contenders by a substantial 27 per cent. The report claims that during the testing period, the user was able to find Jio's LTE signal 96.4 per cent of the times.
In terms of speed in different regions, Idea scored higher in both west and east Uttar Pradesh whereas Vodafone did well in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
Coming to average 4G speed, Airtel was the clear winner with an overall download speed of 6.01mbps. Reliance Jio comes a close second with an overall download speed of 5.13mbps. Vodafone and Idea Cellular almost finished on a tie recording a speed of 4.48mbps by Vodafone and 5mbps by Idea Cellular.
The report provided details on their methodology in a post stating, "OpenSignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 2 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide."
The shrinking number of players will help the telecom industry to monitor quality more closely. Last year, the same report had incorporated RCom in the 3G speed reports. The Idea, Vodafone merger will further reduce the number by creating the single biggest telecom company in the country. For the user, the greater reach is beneficial but the stagnant speed is something the telecom giants will have to take care of.