OpenSignal is back again with some interesting metrics about the 4G data speeds and download speeds in India. In the new metrics, the company is referring to overall download speed, which accounts for not just the average 4G speed of an operator, but also 3G speed and the availability of different types of network.
The company is taking the past 10 three-month test periods into account for analysis and from the graph, it is evident that Airtel, Idea, Jio, and Vodafone have all taken different paths in their overall speed. The first thing that is clear from the graph is that the overall speeds of Airtel, Idea, and Vodafone were all relatively steady, but since September 2017, the overall download speeds were averaging upwards.
Telecom operators have begun expanding the reach of their LTE networks and as more customers had access to faster LTE connections more often, overall speeds for Airtel, Idea, and Vodafone increased. Both Airtel and Idea saw a jump of almost 1MPBS between May 2017 and February 2018 and this resulted in Airtels lead in overall speed metric in December, surpassing Jio.
As for Jio, users were able to find an LTE signal more than 96% of the time. However, if Jio’s 4G speeds suffer due to capacity problems, its overall speeds suffer as well. There was a spike in overall Jio download speeds in May, June, and July last year, pushing it past Airtel.
Then again, once the new capacity was in place, Jio’s overall speeds began to see a downfall and gradually dropped throughout the rest of the year as customers began consuming the new bandwidth. This resulted in putting Jio in the second place, behind Airtel.