Jio’s slow average 4G speeds aren’t a technical limitation: Opensignal

According to the new report by Opensignal a New York-based wireless coverage mapping site, Reliance Jio's average peak speed of 50 Mbps, is 13 times faster than its everyday 4G speed download speed of 3.9 Mbps.

OpenSignal's Kevin Fitchard said in a blog post that, Jio has experienced phenomenal growth since launching its all-4G service last autumn by signing up more than 100 million subscribers in the space of few months, and for much of that period Jio has been offering those customers nearly unlimited access to mobile data. That kind of heavy usage is bound to tax any network, forcing users to vie against one another for bandwidth.

OpenSignal's data shows that Jio's slow average 4G speeds aren't a technical limitation, but rather a capacity bottleneck. As Jio adds more capacity - either through new spectrum or building more cell sites - or as Jio's mobile data consumption levels drop, then its typical download speeds should increase.

Of course, this is almost certainly a temporary condition. Jio has reined in the ultra-cheap unlimited 4G plans it first launched with. As Jio's extraordinary data usage returns to more manageable levels, the big gap between its peak and average speeds should close. That means typical everyday connection speeds for Jio customers will increase as they'll be able to access more often the full technical capabilities of Jio's LTE network. We're already seeing some evidence of this in our most recent data.

In the case of India, we calculated average peak speed from December 2016 to February 2017 so we could compare those numbers directly to the average 4G download scores we measured in our last India report. Just as Bharti Airtel won OpenSignal's fastest 4G speed award in our report, we measured faster-optimized speeds on Airtel's networks than on the other three, he said.

It pointed out that, Airtel's average peak speed test was 56.6 Mbps, which is 5 times faster than its average 4G download test of 11.5 Mbps and both Vodafone and Idea peak speed measurements are about 4 times faster than their 4G measurements.