India

Once again, Jio stood out in our 4G Availability measurements and swept away the award with an exemplary score of 97.8%. This means that our users, on average, were connected to 4G services on Jio’s network 97.8% of the time. And it's remarkable to see such high 4G Availability in India, as we often only see this in highly mature markets. We have only ever reported higher nationwide operator scores in South Korea, which was the undisputed winner of our 4G Availability metric in our recent State of Mobile Network Experience report examining 87 countries.

In the last six months, while our winner’s score grew by just 0.3 percentage points, its rival was the biggest gainer in this category. Airtel’s national 4G Availability grew by 3.6 percentage points to score 89.2%. In our last few reports, we have seen the operator improve its 4G Availability significantly to close the gap with Jio, by enhancing and upgrading its network in several regions across the country.

On the other hand, the newly merged duo — Vodafone and Idea — both remained far behind in this race. While Vodafone’s score grew by a marginal 0.6 percentage points, Idea’s fell by more than four percentage points in our measurements.

India’s mobile video consumption has shown tremendous growth over the past few years, especially due to smartphone devices taking over as the preferred medium. This increasing demand from users is fostering some notable improvement in Video Experience for the majority of operators in India. Our users enjoyed the best national Video Experience on Airtel: the operator’s score grew by a significant 8.6 points to score 53 points and earn a Fair rating (40-55) on a scale of 100. And if the experience of our users continues to increase at the same pace, there is a high likelihood that Airtel will land a Good rating (55-70) in our next report.

While our award winner was at least five points ahead of its competitors, we saw three key players — Vodafone, Idea and Jio — in a close-run race for second place: all three operators, with scores of 48, 47.1 and 46 points respectively, also earned Fair ratings. A Fair rating signifies sluggish video load times accompanied with stops and stutters mid-stream to varying degrees, especially on higher resolutions. BSNL, the 3G-only operator, struggled with a score of 31.9 points to end up with a Poor rating, meaning our users on its network suffered very slow load times and frequent video stalling.

The omnipresence of mobile data networks in the Asian sub-continent has made the use of voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook Messenger increasingly popular among smartphone users in India These apps are changing the way billions of people communicate with each other around the world, and their performance certainly contributes to customer’s overall satisfaction with their network provider.

A unique, first-of-its-kind measurement, Opensignal’s Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger, etc. — using a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union for quantifying overall voice call quality with a series of calibrated technical parameters.

In our global analysis of the Voice App Experiece across 80 countries , India ranked in the lower quartiles of the charts with a Poor rating. This was also reflected at an operator level view in this report, as none of the operators managed to secure an Acceptable rating or above.

While three operators — Vodafone, Idea, and Airtel — closely contested for this award, users on Vodafone enjoyed the best Voice App Experience. However, its score of 72.6 points on a scale of 100, still landed Vodafone in the Poor category (66-74). Idea, Airtel, and Jio also lined up in the same bracket, with scores of 72.3, 72.0 and 70.9 points respectively. A Poor rating signifies that many users were dissatisfied and suffered call quality impairments accompanied by distortions. BSNL was the only operator to land a Very Poor rating, with a score of 61.6 points.

Looking at Voice Experience by network technology, in our 4G Voice Experience measurements, Vodafone and Idea were the only operators to earn an Acceptable rating (75-80), while Airtel and Jio were rated as Poor.

Once again, Airtel claimed the award in our overall Download Speed Experience category with a winning score of 9.6 Mbps. In our previous report, we saw Airtel sprint to increase the gap with its rivals, but in this race, the leader’s score grew by less than 1 Mbps. Conversely, our users experienced the greatest improvements on Vodafone and Idea’s network, as their current overall scores grew by at least 2 Mbps — to reach 7.9 and 7.6 Mbps respectively — outpacing Jio’s Download Speed Experience of 6.7 Mbps, which has increased by just 0.4 Mbps. BSNL, being a 3G-only operator, lagged behind with our users experiencing speeds of 3.1 Mbps.

When we split Download Speeds by technology, Airtel also secured a lead in 4G Download Speed Experience with our users seeing their average speeds boost above 10 Mbps. Both Vodafone and Idea came close to challenging Airtel with scores of 9.7 and 9.2 respectively, beating Jio’s score of 6.7 Mbps. By contrast, in 3G Download Speed Experience, at 3.1 Mbps BSNL was slightly ahead of Vodafone’s and Idea’s score of 2.8 Mbps and at least one megabit ahead of Airtel.

Idea maintained its grip on our Upload Speed Experience award with a leading score of 3.2 Mbps. In the last six months, this winner’s score has improved by just 0.2 Mbps, compared with our users on Vodafone improvement of half a megabit to reach 3.1 Mbps. Both Idea and Vodafone had a comfortable lead in overall scores — almost 30% faster than Airtel’s score of 2.4 Mbps, 50% faster than Jio’s score of 2.1 Mbps and at least three times faster than BSNL’s score of 0.9 Mbps.

This result was mirrored in our 4G Upload Speed category. However, in our 3G Upload Speed category, BSNL’s score of 0.9 Mbps was on a par with Idea and Vodafone, which led to a three-way split between them. Airtel was left behind with its score of 0.5 Mbps.

While download speeds get the most attention, upload speed is becoming more important as consumer mobile habits shift away from mere consumption to content creation and content sharing on popular social media platforms and video streaming applications. This shift gives operators with the most powerful upstream connections a distinct competitive edge. For the time being at least, Idea holds this advantage.

Jio kept hold of our award in Latency Experience, as our users on its network enjoyed the fastest network response time of 54.2 milliseconds. While Airtel missed first place by a difference of 3ms, Vodafone and Idea were further behind with scores of 64.2 and 74.5ms respectively. Our users on BSNL received the slowest Latency Experience of 80.6ms.

When we look at our 3G and 4G Latency scores individually, the trend in the national results starts to make more sense. Interestingly, Airtel’s 4G Latency score of 53.6ms takes a lead over Jio. This reinforces the importance of offering users high 4G Availability: Jio being a 4G-only operator and having superior 4G Availability meant that our users on its network spent the most time connected to faster 4G networks, allowing the operator to win our overall Latency Experience award.

Latency — also called network responsiveness — is a metric often overlooked, but it affects the mobile data experience in many subtle ways. The lower the latency is on a network, the better the experience on a host of mobile applications and services, from web browsing and Voice-over-IP, to real-time multiplayer gaming.