Kolkata emerges as the top city with 90% 4G availability: Opensignal

According to London-based wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal, Kolkata has emerged as the top city with a 4G availability score of an impressive over 90 percent.

"We analyzed our data for 4G availability across all of India's 22 telecoms circles in the 90 days from the start of May 2018 and found Kolkata came top with a hugely impressive score of 90.7 percent," Opensignal said in a statement.

However, the other 21 circles saw LTE reach scores over 80 percent including Punjab coming second with 89.8 percent in this metric, followed by Bihar on 89.2 percent, Madhya Pradesh with 89.1 percent, and Orissa on 89 percent.

Many of the top telecoms circles for 4G availability were in the East and North of the country, reflecting a similar trend in our analysis of LTE reach in India's cities six months ago. Indeed, the city of Kolkata was just outside top three in India's cities, coming fourth behind Patna, Kanpur, and Allahabad, Opensignal informed.

In its last report, Patna had beaten Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai to top the 4G availability.

It said that their measurements show that the disparity in 4G availability between India's cities is also getting slimmer. The difference in our 4G availability metric between top-placed Patna with 92.6 percent and 10th-placed Bangalore with 88.3 percent was just 4.3 percentage points. All 20 cities in our measurements have achieved 4G availability measurements of over 80 percent - a score we would expect to see in many of the worlds most mature 4G markets.

The Indian government has just kicked off the process for a major spectrum auction in the country, which should allow the operators to make further improvements in these highly impressive 4G availability scores, the company added.

The telecom sector is developing at lightning speed, with operators investing heavily in their 4G networks, while fierce competition has led to several major mobile mergers in the past couple of years.