- Airtel, Jio have the best mobile networks in India
- Key Findings of the Report
Airtel maintains its dominance as India’s fastest and highest quality carrier across 2G, 3G, HSPA and LTE mobile networks
- Jio emerges as the most consistent carrier, with better coverage. While it does not perform as fast as Airtel, it is second best in quality and poses tough competition in the LTE space.
- Contrary to 2015, LTE is now much faster than WiFi across almost all cities in India.
- The performance of mobile networks in Tier-II cities like Jaipur and Pune has become at par with the performance in Tier-I cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru.
- LTE is the most variable network of all, with speeds reaching as high as 2.7 times the median.
US-based Twin Prime, an innovator in mobile data delivery 
optimization, recently launched the India findings of its semi-annual State of Mobile Performance Report 2016 H1, which is a detailed study on the current state of mobile performance and features an in-depth ranking of carriers by performance, coverage, network quality and performance variability.
The findings reveal that although the number of network carriers are increasing, Airtel is still the fastest carrier (Fig: 1) and is the top performer across 2G, 3G, HSPA, and LTE mobile networks. According to the report, Jio is fast emerging as Airtel’s main competitor in LTE space. Though Jio is not performing as fast as Airtel, it is second best in quality—the experience is more consistent and the coverage much better. The report also says that Jio has the best LTE Coverage in India, closely followed by Idea and Airtel in the second and third positions respectively. Aircel has the lowest LTE coverage.
Most people perceive WiFi to be better than cellular networks (Fig: 3), because WiFi is more reliable and faster than cellular but this may not be the case with LTE in many cities. However, the findings of the report show that LTE is now much faster than WiFi across almost all cities in India. LTE has caught up even in Mumbai, where WiFi is 3x faster.
Mr. Kartik Chandrayana, CEO and Co-Founder- Twin Prime, said, “We are excited to announce the launch of State of Mobile Performance Report 2016 H1. In an ever-changing world of technology, telecom operators are continually trying to get the edge over one another. A significant growth in LTE devices in India is great news for customers looking to experience rich media such as videos. This is a great opportunity and a challenge for India’s booming m-commerce, travel, dating, and other such mobile businesses. Twin Prime solves the inherent volatility and diversity among devices and networks so companies can increase user engagement and build brand affinity.”
For the State of Mobile Performance Report 2016 H1 report, Twin Prime analyzed over 6 billion data points collected from 600 apps with traffic across US, India, Europe and Southeast Asia. The company tracked more than 1,500 different network operators to measure their performance over 2G, 3G, HSPA, HSPA-Plus, LTE and WiFi networks. The annual report presents a comprehensive analysis of the valuable market-specific app performance tips for developers looking to launch apps in India, and an overview of how other developers structure their app’s content with performance in mind. To download the full H1 2016 State of Mobile Performance Report, please click here.
