With the release of new fiber-to-the-home services and a strong push by providers to bring 4G to more parts of the country, we decided to check in and see how fixed broadband speed, mobile speed and 4G Availability have looked over the last two quarters in India.
Our analysis includes performance data from 21,096,823 consumer-initiated tests taken with Speedtest® and coverage data from over 2.5 billion coverage scans on 2,436,758 devices during Q2-Q3 2019.
For the first time ever we are also making available for download a detailed report on performance by operator including an in-depth look at peak time performance. Download the full report.
Mobile and fixed speeds are increasing at the country level
Mean fixed broadband download speeds in India rose 16.5% during Q2-Q3 2019 and topped 34.07 Mbps in September. Compared to Bangladesh, which saw a similar rate of improvement but lower speeds at 24.02 Mbps, and Pakistan, where speeds stayed relatively flat between 8.54 and 9.14 Mbps, India is the regional leader in mean download speed.
With Reliance Jio’s rollout of its new GigaFiber service in India in early September, we will likely continue to see country-wide speeds increase. (Download the full report to compare Jio’s monthly fixed download speeds before and after the launch of GigaFiber.)
However, mobile download speeds were relatively flat in India, fluctuating between 10.63 Mbps and 11.18 Mbps during Q2-Q3 2019. Regionally, India’s mobile performance is marginally faster than Bangladesh’s, which saw average speeds max out at 10.43 Mbps, and somewhat slower than Pakistan’s top speeds of 15.55 Mbps.
4G Availability continues to improve in India
India’s mobile providers are still trying to provide consistent 4G coverage across the country. We compared coverage data for over 231,274,713 samples from Speedtest Android users across Indian mobile operators in Q2-Q3 2019 to benchmark India’s 4G Availability against other markets in the region.
4G Availability is the percentage of an operator’s known locations where a device has access to LTE service (including roaming). India’s 4G Availability was relatively high at 87.9% across providers during Q2-Q3 2019. That means that Speedtest users had access to LTE service at 87.9% of surveyed locations. For comparison, 4G Availability was 58.9% in Pakistan and 58.7% in Bangladesh during the same period.
Fixed broadband speeds show wide disparities between India’s largest cities
In a country as large as India, country-wide averages factor in many regional differences. To get a clearer picture of how consumers experience the internet across the country, we looked at fixed and mobile download speeds in the 15 largest cities in India during Q2-Q3 2019.
Chennai had by far the fastest mean download speed over fixed broadband (51.07 Mbps), followed by Bengaluru (42.50 Mbps) and Hyderabad (41.68 Mbps). The slowest download speeds on our list were measured in Nagpur (20.10 Mbps), followed by Pune (22.78 Mbps) and Kanpur (23.20 Mbps).
Mobile download speeds — which include all cellular technologies — showed somewhat less variation from city to city. Mumbai (11.87 Mbps), Indore (11.80 Mbps), Visakhapatnam (11.74 Mbps), Hyderabad (11.48) and Kolkata (11.46 Mbps) had the fastest mobile download speeds. The slowest mean download speed on our list was measured in Lucknow (8.94 Mbps).
Want to see which ISPs and mobile operators were fastest in each city, plus a breakdown of how operators perform at peak times of network congestion, based on signal metrics? Download the full report.