Bihar capital Patna has surprisingly trumped Indian metros to top OpenSignal’s latest 4G availability metric, which measures where users can get access to an LTE connection most of the time. More cities from central and eastern India also featured in the top ten of the 4G availability metric, with Kanpur taking the second spot, Allahabad on third, Kolkata on fourth, and Bhopal on the fifth spot.
Mumbai and Delhi, on the other hand, didn’t even make it to the top ten and were placed 15th and 17th respectively. OpenSignal in a statement said:
“Our 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 Bengaluru with 88.3 percent was just 4.3 percentage points”.
OpenSignal collected the data over 90 days from December 1, 2017 and took into account user experience of 4G availability in 20 of the country’s largest cities. The firm further added:
“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…Driven by fierce competition, India now has one of the most extensive 4G footprints in the world. The growth in availability of LTE in the country is particularly remarkable, as users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 86 percent of the time which is a rise of some 10 percentage points from a year earlier”.
The report also mentions Reliance Jio, which has played a major role in the adoption of 4G/LTE in India. The company not only led to better 4G infrastructure in major cities, but also helped increase 4G adoption in rural India.
A recent report from CyberMedia Research revealed that the company added 83 million new 4G subscriptions in rural India last year.
