Even as the average speed of Bharti Airtel remain high, the total number of people who conducted 4G speed tests from Airtel’s network is only 3% of total number of people who were conducting similar tests from Jio.
In fact, Jio users accounted for 91% of the total 4G speedtests conducted using TRAI’s ‘My Speed’ app, which was launched about three months ago. In comparison, Airtel accounted for about 3%, Idea for about 2.5%.
A total of 22.1 lakh 4G speedtests were conducted by Jio users using TRAI’s app. In comparison, only 70,367 users from Airtel’s network conducted similar tests. Idea accounted for 59,475 tests, while RCom users conducted 19,787 4G speed tests.
The proportion was heavily skewed towards Jio in rural areas, while operators like Idea, Vodafone and Airtel accounted for comparatively higher number of users in cities.
For example, in the city region of Mumbai, Jio users conducted 29,550 tests and Bharti users accounted for 2,674 such tests and RCom 2,370.
In Delhi, RJio had 2.1 lakh tests on its network, Airtel 13,236 and Vodafone 4,142.
In states like UP and Maharashtra, the proportion between the number of tests on Jio’s network and Airtel’s network was similar to the national average at 30 to 1.
AVERAGE SPEED
Despite accounting for only a small fraction of total tests, operators like Idea, Vodafone and Airtel managed to rack up high average speeds.
On a national level, for example, the average download speed for a Bharti 4G user was 11.47 Mbps, while that of Jio was only 6 Mbps. Similarly Idea, Vodafone and RCom scored around 7-7.5 Mbps.
The speed difference was visible in most places. In Mumbai, the average Airtel 4G test customer was getting over 15 Mbps compared to 10 Mbps for RJio users and 8.4 Mbps for Reliance Communications users.
What remains to be seen is if the smaller operators can maintain their high bandwidth when they grow in scale.
TRAI My Speed app can be downloaded from here. Ookla’s speedtest can be downloaded from here.