Airtel narrowing gap with Reliance Jio on 4G in India: Report

NEW DELHI: Airtel has come closer to challenging Reliance Jio which continues to reign supreme on 4G availability and 4G coverage experience in India, says a new report by mobile analytics company Opensignal.

While the average proportion of time that Jio users spent connected to 4G has increased by 0.5 of a percentage point since the last report to reach an impressive 98.7 per cent, Airtel saw its score increase by 1.1 percentage points. "As a consequence, Jio's lead has dropped from 3.7 percentage points to 3.1," said the report.

In regional analysis of 49 cities, Airtel came close to challenging Jio's dominance on 4G availability in a majority of the cities although Jio continued to win almost all awards, said the report. While Jio won in 48 cities outright it drew for the first place with Airtel in Coimbatore.

However, for the second report in a row, Airtel has won four of the awards outright -- video experience, games experience, voice app experience and download Speed experience, while ownership of the upload speed experience award smoothly passed from Vodafone to Vi.

This is the first report in which Opensignal treated Vodafone and Idea as a single operator -- Vi -- in line with the combined operator's new branding that was announced on September 7.

For the report, Opensignal examined the mobile network experience of the four main mobile network operators in India: Airtel, BSNL, Jio and Vi, over a period of 90 days beginning May 1 to see how they fared, and further delved deeper into 49 of India's largest cities, comparing the experience users received on these four operators.