Bharti Airtel beats Reliance Jio in 4G speeds: OpenSignal

NEW DELHI: Sunil Mittal-driven Bharti Airtel has become top telco network both in 3G and 4G download speeds, surpassing bitter rival Reliance Jio which has a largest 4G-LTE footprint in India, a new OpenSignal finding revealed Wednesday.



“Airtel held onto 3G and 4G speed awards, and it wrested our overall speed award away from Jio, locking down the top spot in all three of our speed categories,” the London-based wireless coverage mapping firm said.


Reliance Jio, however, remained the closest contender in overall speed due to its high level of 4G access, according to OpenSignal.

Mukesh Ambani-owned Jio that has launched commercial telecom operations in September 2016, was able to deliver typical everyday download speeds of 5.1 Mbps in tests, compared to Bharti Airtel's 6 Mbps.

In October 2017 study, India’s market leader also rated top in both 4G and 3G speeds, and demonstrated an average LTE downloads of 9.2 Mbps and 3G downloads of 3.6 Mbps on its networks.

The study revealed that the new comer Jio was still ahead of key rivals in 4G availability, beating the three— Airtel, Vodafone and Idea by at least 27% points in measurements.

While Airtel demonstrates higher speed, it lags furthest behind on network coverage (66%), behind Jio (96%), Vodafone (68%) and Idea (68%), the OpenSignal said.

Our testers were able to find an LTE signal on Jio's network 96.4% of the time in our latest test period, up from 95.6% in our October report, the mapping firm added.

OpenSignal’s findings were based on a 736,571 devices test from a period ranging from December 1, 2017 to February 28, 2018.

In a course of six months, the firm said that the telecom service providers have gone to great lengths to expand their 4G services reach and recorded a surge in 4G availability metric by Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone India.

The firm, however, said that in the coming quarters, the challenge for incumbents would be to match new player Reliance Jio’s capacity and the coverage, as they continue their acquisition spree in the Indian telecom market.

The new findings also revealed that India has moved to 85% in LTE availability and joined high-performing 4G countries like Sweden, Taiwan and Australia.