The rapid deployment of 5G across India has led to a jump in data usage, which has put mobile phone networks under strain and dragged down download speeds, mobile analytics company Opensignal said in a report.
The average download speeds in the first quarter of 2024 on Reliance Jio‘s network had fallen from a year ago, while the parameter on rival Bharti Airtel‘s network had improved, it said.
“Given the additional load on the 5G network both in terms of the number of subscribers and data traffic, not surprisingly, India’s national 5G download speed score decreased from 304 Mbps in Q1 2023 to 280.7 Mbps in Q4 2023,” Sylwia Kechiche, senior director of industry analysis at Opensignal, said in the report.
The network and analysis firm said India’s 5G customer base has increased to 180 million, with the majority being on Jio’s 5G network (108 million) and the rest 72 million on Airtel‘s 5G network. GSMA Intelligence predicts that 5G connections will grow further, exceeding 260 million in Q4 2025 and accounting for 22% of all connections.Opensignal noted that both Jio and Airtel provide commercial 5G services at the same pricing as 4G, along with unlimited 5G data, which in turn, was driving data traffic growth. It cited Trai data, which found that high-speed mobile internet consumption using 5G surged to 12.6% on-year in Q4 2023, or to 6,239 petabytes.Airtel has improved its 5G performance across all telecom circles, barring Punjab, Mumbai and Delhi, the report said. Nationally, the average 5G download speeds seen by Airtel’s users have risen to 273.6 Mbps in January-March 2024 from 260.4 Mbps in the year-ago quarter.
Popular in Telecom
Over the same period, Airtel’s 5G availability grew from 12.5% to 20.7%. 5G availability is the time spent by 5G users with a 5G device on a 5G connection only.
On the other hand, the network analysis firm found that Jio’s 5G download speed stood at 261.8 Mbps in Q1 2024 compared to 323.6 Mbps in Q1 2023, and its users experienced a similar decrease at a circle level, too. The most hurt were Jio 5G users in Uttar Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal, Opensignal said. Nationally, Jio’s 5G availability rose from 34.9% in Q1 2023 to 64.9% in Q1 2024.
“The reason is that as Jio scales across the country, it increasingly leverages low-band spectrum – the proportion of 5G readings we collected when our users were connected to Jio’s 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands has almost doubled from nearly 10% in Q1 2023 to over 18% in Q1 2024,” Kechiche said.
This post was originally published on the 3rd party mentioned in the title ofthis site