Ookla reveals fixed broadband speeds increased in India but stayed flat on mobile

In a recent study titled ‘Exploring recent trends in the India Telecom Market’, Ookla says that the average broadband download speeds in India rose 16.5 percent. It topped out at 34.07 Mbps in September. The analysis was conducted for the second and third quarter of 2019. [caption id=“attachment_4762651” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Representational image. Image: Reuters[/caption] Ookla’s analysis of performance data is based on 21,096,823 tests conducted by consumers using Speedtest. The coverage data comes from 2.5 million coverage scans on 2,436,758 devices during Q2-Q3 2019. India is ahead in the South Asia region in mean download speed, going ahead of Bangladesh (24.02 Mbps) and Pakistan (8.54 to 9.14 Mbps). The company expects fixed download speeds to rise as Reliance Jio starts rolling out its GigaFiber service in India. While it’s been drastically rising in broadband speeds, Ookla says that mobile download speeds have been “relatively flat” in India. In the analysis period, the speeds fluctuated between 10.63 Mbps and 11.18 Mbps. The country is still ahead of the other countries in the region, however, the margin in mobile download speeds isn’t too much. [caption id=“attachment_7544471” align=“alignnone” width=“2000”]  Fixed broadband and mobile download speeds analysis in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Image: Ookla.[/caption] India is seeing continuous improvement in 4G coverage. Ookla’s 4G Availability metric is measured as the “percentage of an operator’s known locations where a device has access to LTE service (including roaming).” Between the three countries, India has a considerably high 4G availability of 87.9 percent while Pakistan has 58.9 percent and Bangladesh is at 58.7 percent. According to Ookla, this metric “means that Speedtest users had access to LTE service at 87.9% of surveyed locations.” All these numbers give an average measure of the download speeds on fixed and mobile internet networks. However, the study revealed that there’s a lot of disparities in the numbers across different cities in India. From the data, Chennai has the fastest average broadband download speed at 51.07 Mbps and Mumbai had the fastest average mobile download speed at 11.87 Mbps. Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.