Opensignal: Bharti Airtel on top in 3G and 4G speed, beats Jio

According to a data by coverage mapping firm OpenSignal, India largest telecom service provider Bharti Airtel has become top network in terms of providing 3G and 4G speed, while Jio remained the closest contender in overall speed due to its high level of 4G access.

"Airtel held onto our 3G and 4G speed awards since OpenSignal's last report, and it wrested our overall speed award away from Jio, locking down the top spot in all three of our speed categories," data said.

However, Jio continued to dominate our 4G availability metric as our testers were able to access an LTE signal 96.4 percent of the time and such a score is exceptional, reflecting its commitment to building out a 4G-only network without 3G mobile data services to fall back on, mapping firm said.

The data also revealed that Indian operators are still focused on growing LTE's reach rather than injecting more speed into their 4G services.

We recorded 4G availability increases for every major operator over the last six months. All of India's major 4G providers have now crossed the 65 percent LTE availability threshold, and three of them are now nearing the 70 percent mark. But we saw little movement in our 4G download metrics. In fact, we tracked slight drops in LTE speeds for three operators, Opensignal added.

This is the third State of Mobile Networks report for India in which it parsed billions of measurements collected by 736,571 smart device users in the months of December, January and February.

"We analyzed that data to compare the 4G services of India's four major 4G operators Airtel, Idea, Jio, and Vodafone as well as the 3G services of BSNL Mobile. Though India has many more operators than these five, the country's complex regulatory environment means that each provider is licensed to operate in a particular set of regions, known as telecom circles. We chose these operators as they all offer 3G and/or 4G services in the large majority of those circles, making them the ideal candidates for our nationwide analysis. The number of national operators is also steadily shrinking. We included Reliance Communications (RCom) in the 3G analysis of our last report, but since the operator has exited the consumer mobile business and has shut down much of its 2G and 3G operations,"Opensignal further said.

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Furthermore, it pointed out that Airtel won our 4G speed award in 10 of the 18 circles, but the speed prizes in the other eight regions were up for grabs. Idea won 4G speed outright in both Uttar Pradesh telecom circles - making a clean sweep of India's most populous state. Meanwhile, Vodafone took the awards in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Idea and Vodafone also closely contested several other regions, producing draws for our 4G awards in Bihar, Kerala, Kolkata and West Bengal.