Airtel 4G Speed Is Three Times Faster Than Jio: OpenSignal

Opensignal has come up with a new report, which completely lambasts Jio’s claims regarding 4G speed on their network. The report reveals that Airtel is 3 times faster than Jio, in terms of average 4G speed, and Idea has the worst peak speed among all carriers.

This report seems an extension of their earlier report which came out in April 2017, in which Airtel was hailed as the #1 telco when it comes to 3G/4G download speed.

However, with the latest report, Opensignal has also attempted to find out the reason why Jio’s performance has come to poor in their report.

Note here, that OpenSignal measures mobile internet across the world, based on the data churned out by their 20 million app users. Although this sample size is huge, it cannot be held as the final proof of Internet speed among mobile carriers.

But yes, their explanation certainly has some sound logic.

But first, the results…

Opensignal Results: Airtel Is 3 times Faster Than Jio!

There are basically two results from OpenSignal’s latest mobile Internet speed report, which is based on speed recorded by their 20 million odd app users:

a) With 56.9 Mbps speed, Airtel Is #1 In Average Peak speed ranking among all telecom operators, meanwhile, Jio comes at #2 with 50 Mbps average peak speed. In this ranking, Idea has been ranked as the worst telecom provider, with 29.8 Mbps average peak speed. Vodafone is at #3 with 36.5 Mbps average peak speed.

On an average, 11.5 Mbps is the average mobile internet speed in India. This means Airtel is providing 5x of the average speed in the 4G network.

b) When it comes to average download speed, then it becomes interesting. Jio’s speed has been found to be 3 times slower than Airtel, which has recorded 12 Mbps download speed in the 4G network. Both Idea and Vodafone have almost same speed at 9 Mbps.

The findings have been taken out from OpenSignal users’ app records between the period December 2016 and February 2017.

OpenSignal Explanation Regarding jio’s Performance

In the report, OpenSignal has admitted that no doubt Reliance Jio has installed state of the art infrastructure for making their network super fast and super efficient.

But, as OpenSignal states, every mobile network in the world is basically a shared resource, and the particular speed at a particular time on a particular mobile can be based on so many factors – primary being the number of users, and the amount of data being used.

Now, as per the report, Reliance Jio has been providing almost free data for a large number of users (100 million at last count), for a prolonged period of time.

This is putting pressure on their network, and as a result, their average download speed is three times slower than Jio. On the same hand, the peak average speed is second only to Airtel, which means that when conditions are favourable, Jio has the capability to beat even the best in speed.

The report says, “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.”