The discussion on India’s fastest network has come back again but with proof and authentic data unlike the past advertisements, which lead to the bitter war of words and complain to the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI). London headquartered, OpenSignal, which specialises in wireless coverage mapping with the help of crowd-sources data on carrier signal quality from users who have its consumer mobile application installed said that India’s fastest network is Airtel and Reliance Jio offer biggest coverage but it lags behind Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea in terms of 4G speeds.
Airtel offers the fastest 4G speeds followed by Vodafone and Idea, while the Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio came at 4th position. However, in terms of overall download speeds (which includes 3G and 4G), Jio is ahead of the pack, with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, BSNL, and Reliance Communications (RCom) following it, said the report.
Also, Jio stood well ahead of the pack in terms of coverage. OpenSignal said it users were able to latch onto a Jio LTE connection 91.6% of the time nationally. That availability score isn’t just impressive for India — more than 30 percentage points ahead of Jio’s rivals — but it’s an exceptional score on the global level. Only a handful of operators have crossed the 90% availability threshold, showing that Jio has lived up to its promises to build a far-reaching 4G service in a relatively short amount of time. None of the three other 4G operators passed the 60% availability mark in OpenSignal tests. Idea and Vodafone contested the second spot in rankings, each averaging LTE availability metrics of 59%, while Airtel ranked in last place with users were able to make an Airtel LTE connection only 54.7% of the time.
In terms of speed, Airtel came first, it offered 9.15Mbps download speed which is three point lower than its earlier speed of about 11Mbps with Vodafone at 7.45Mbps, Idea at 7.4Mbps, and Reliance Jio finishing at fourth with 5.81Mbps. Looking at 3G download speeds, Airtel topped the chart with 3.62Mbps, followed by Vodafone at 3.12Mbps, Idea at 2.6Mbps, BSNL at 1.76Mbps speed, and RCom at 1.71Mbps speed. Jio didn’t figure in the list as it is a 4G-only network. “Airtel and Vodafone took our top slots for 3G speed, and their test averages of 4.7 Mbps and 4.3 Mbps were actually higher than the average 4G speed we measured on Jio,” said OpenSignal.
