India's 4G download speeds 4.5 times faster at night: Opensignal

According to a report by OpenSignal, India's 4G download speeds are up to 4.5 times faster at night.

Opensignal said at 4 a.m. smartphone users in the 20 cities analyzed experience average download speeds of 16.8 Mbps, compared with the daily average of 6.5 Mbps but due to high congestion, at 10 PM smartphone users experience the slowest speeds.

While Navi Mumbai scored 8.1 Mbps in average LTE download speed in our measurements, Allahabad came last with an average of 4.0 Mbps - half the speed.

The results thus suggest that network congestion is one of the main reasons why smartphone users in India experience a relatively slow average 4G download speeds.

"We observed that Indian cities face different degrees of congestion and that users experience speeds over 20 Mbps at quiet times. But this only occurs in the middle of the night: in the daytime, a large number of connected devices erodes the networks' capacity and adversely affects everyone's mobile network experience," Francesco Rizzato from Opensignal said in a blog post.

However, all cities show a consistent trend in our data, namely that users experience widely different speeds across the hours of the day. When the mobile network is busiest, the average LTE download speed drops 2.8 Mbps compared to the daily average - with users in Allahabad experiencing the slowest 4G download speed at 2 Mbps.

The other side of the coin is that when the network is less congested, download speeds jump on average by 10.3 Mbps, with Indore hitting the highest speed of 21.6 Mbps and all of the 20 cities above 14 Mbps.

It said with the increasing number of people accessing mobile services, cheaper smartphone devices, and rising average data consumption per user, India's mobile operators can expect the number of connected devices and data traffic to continue soaring and the challenge of network congestion to persist.