The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released the latest crowd-sourced data about mobile broadband speeds in India from its MySpeed app (Android, iOS), showing Reliance Jio had the highest average LTE speeds among all telecom operators in August. The average download speeds for Jio users during the month hovered at around the 21.3Mbps mark, which was significantly above all its nearest rivals, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.
Airtel came in at number two with 8.2Mbps, which was a bit of a decline from the 8.8Mbps the company had registered the previous month. Vodafone’s average download speeds during the month remained flat at 7.7Mbps, while Idea’s speeds declined from 6.6Mbps in July to 6.1Mbps last month. As for upload speeds, Vodafone topped the charts with 5.5Mbps, while Idea, Jio and Airtel came in at numbers two, three and four with 5.1Mbps, 4.4Mbps and 3.1Mbps, respectively.
Even as the Indian telcos continue to improve their networks to offer better and faster connectivity at more affordable prices, the country continues to languish at the lower-end of the spectrum in terms of data speeds, when compared to other regions around the world.
While the commercial launch of Reliance Jio brought affordable broadband internet to millions of Indians, overall cellular data speeds in the country remains abysmally low. While global speed-test leader, Ookla, last year released a report that claimed the country ranked 109 globally in terms of network speeds, an OpenSignal report also claimed that India had the slowest internet speeds among 88 nations surveyed for its study.
