Smaller cities such as Patna, Kanpur, Allahabad, Kolkata, Bhopal and Lucknow have better presenace of 4G service than the big metro cities or technology hub in India, said a report from UK-based OpenSignal. The company which measures wireless connectivity with the help of crowdsource data said that Patna is currently top of OpenSignal’s league table for 4G availability. “It’s jumped ahead of the trendy tech hubs in the south and west of India in our 4G availability metric, which measures where users can get access to an LTE connection more of the time,” Peter Boyland of OpenSignal in a blogpost.
According to report, central and eastern regions saw more cities in the top ten of OpenSignal’s latest 4G availability metrics, as cities in other regions began to close the gap with the tech hubs of the south. “In our latest measurements, which covers the 90 days from December 1, 2017, we looked at the user experience of 4G availability in 20 of India’s largest cities. Four cities from India’s central and eastern regions – Patna, Kanpur, Allahabad, Kolkata, Bhopal and Lucknow – made it into our top ten,” said report.
According to reprot, disparity in 4G availability between cities is also getting slimmer. The difference in 4G availability metric between top-placed Patna with 92.6% and 10th-placed Bangalore with 88.3% was just 4.3 percentage points. All 20 cities in measurements have achieved 4G availability measurements of over 80%.
On 4G speeds, the tech hubs in the south and west of the country continued to dominate top ten in 4G speed metric. The rest of India is catching up in terms of the 4G availability user experience, and these cities are likely to close the gap in terms of 4G speed in coming months as operator network rollout accelerates.
Report attributes that this shrinking disparity between the southern and western tech hubs and India’s other cities reflects the rapid growth of 4G in the country. Driven by fierce competition, India now has one of the most extensive 4G footprints in the world. The growth in availability of LTE in the country is particularly remarkable, as users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 86% of the time, a rise of some 10 percentage points from a year earlier, as we found in our latest State of LTE report. The market is still feeling the aftershocks from the debut of Reliance Jio, and with three mobile mergers on the table, our city rankings for 4G availability are likely to see further significant shifts in the coming months.
