Country-wide internet speeds expected to increase: Ookla
New Delhi: Ookla®, the company behind Speedtest®, today released its report examining the recent trends in Indian telecom market during the last two quarters. According to the findings of the report, mean fixed broadband download speeds in India rose by 16.5% during Q2-Q3 2019 and topped 34.07 Mbps in September.
India is the leader in mean fixed broadband download speed amongst other neighboring countries with Bangladesh at 24.02 Mbps and Pakistan, with flat speeds between 8.54 and 9.14 Mbps. The report highlights that with Reliance Jio’s rollout of its new GigaFiber service in India in early September, the fixed broadband speeds will continue to increase country-wide.
As per the report, the 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.
The full report entitled “Exploring recent trends in the India telecom market”, is available at the URL: www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/india-telecom-market-2019/.
4G Availability in India
As per the findings of the report, 4G availability continues to improve in India. India’s 4G Availability was relatively high at 87.9% across providers during Q2-Q3 2019. For comparison, 4G Availability was 58.9% in Pakistan and 58.7% in Bangladesh during the same period.
Ookla 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.
Fixed broadband speeds show wide disparities between India’s largest cities
On comparing the fixed and mobile download speeds in the 15 largest cities in India, the reports shows wide disparities between the cities. 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 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. This includes 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 measured in Lucknow (8.94 Mbps).
The report is a result of performance data from over 21 million consumer-initiated tests taken with Speedtest® and coverage data from over 2.5 billion coverage scans on 2.4 million devices during Q2-Q3 2019.