Globally India has the slowest (opens in new tab) 4G speeds (opens in new tab) in the world, but within India, Navi Mumbai takes the lead with the speed of 8.52Mbps. OpenSignal’s report (opens in new tab) compares network speeds and coverage across the nation among 20 cities between the months of December and February. The company is using this data to map wireless coverage. It shows that the fastest speeds are skewed towards new cities, which are now emerging as leaders.
In leaps and bounds
After Navi Mumbai, Chennai has the second fastest speeds. The city has doubled from 4.4Mbps to 8.52Mbps since March last year. Kolkata (opens in new tab) came in third with 8.46Mbps followed by Bengaluru (opens in new tab) at 7.17Mbps.
Meanwhile, Allahabad was the only metropolitan city to register speeds lower than 4Mbps, at the average of 3.5Mbps.
The southern and western regions of India seem to be doing well since six of the ten top cities are a part of those zones.
Since the report only takes into account 20 cities across the country, its analysis shouldn’t be taken as comprehensive but it does show that the disparity between speeds still exists and should be addressed in the near future.
All systems go!
Somewhat surprisingly, the OpenSignal report said that the Long-term Evolution (LTE) availability is ‘remarkable’ since users were able to connect to 4G more than 86 percent of the time. The year before, that figure was 10 percent lower.
This indicates how fast the 4G market is growing and being the second largest smartphone market in the world, India has one of the biggest LTE footprints globally.
The telecom sector has seen a turn of events (opens in new tab) ever since Reliance Jio (opens in new tab) entered the market. The price war that has taken place between telcos has resulted in at least three telcom mergers, the biggest being between Idea and Vodafone (opens in new tab). Since this will result in spectrum space consolidations, the effect will probably be seen with an increase in
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