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India's fastest LTE connections are in Mumbai

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OpenSignal is preparing its first public report for India, but while we crunch our numbers, I thought we'd share a sneak peak at what we're finding in one of the world's most fascinating mobile markets. We compiled our LTE speed and availability tests in India's biggest cities over the previous three months to see how 4G performance compared in different urban regions of the country.

First let's take a look at speed.

Fast speeds are fitting for the fast pace of India's financial, commercial and entertainment capital, and true to form, Mumbai came out on top of our speed rankings. Our smartphone users in Mumbai averaged LTE download speeds of 6.9 Mbps. Kolkata was the other city in our sample to average LTE speeds greater than 6 Mbps. Meanwhile the seat of government Delhi didn't fare quite as well, averaging 4.6 Mbps. Gujarati metropolis Ahmedabad ranked lowest with a speed score of 3.9 Mbps.

Gujarat's major cities may not have shone in our speed tests, but they performed admirably in our 4G availability measurements. OpenSignal's availability metric measures the proportion of time our crowdsourced users can access a particular network, and in the case of India, our testers in Ahmedabad an Surat were able to latch onto an LTE signal 85% of the time. Impressively nine of the ten cities we studied landed above 75% in our LTE availability scores. The only city to miss the mark was Pune.

In general, Indian operators appear to be doing an excellent job making LTE consistently accessible in the big cities. Last month, I blogged about our most recent data in top European cities, and as you can see for yourself India's metros compare quite favorable to the urban hubs of Europe in our 4G availability scores. In our measured speeds, though, India's LTE services are still lacking. According to OpenSignal's State of LTE report, the typical LTE download speed globally is 17.4 Mbps, and we're starting to see many countries push their average speeds well beyond 30 Mbps. In India's cities, the signals are there, but they're still underpowered.

We'll continue to publish more data from India as we gear up for first public report, so check back for further updates. In the meantime, if you're an a smartphone user in India and want to help us measure the consumer mobile data experience, we encourage you to join our crowdsourced testing community by downloading the OpenSignal app or our new Meteor app.