Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been working on making mobile broadband speeds as well as network coverage for quite some time now. In effect, they launched their own MySpeed app to test upload/download speeds along with an analytics portal to get details on network coverage, Quality of Service and more. Now, the government regulator has posted results to show 4G data speeds in the country, and unsurprisingly Reliance Jio 4G is at the bottom of the table.
Even since Jio announced it welcome offer, bringing in a lot more consumers onboard, data speeds have been going down continuously. Now, let's talk about the speed test results. According to the MySpeed portal, data was collected for 15,52,857 speed tests and it was found that Reliance Jio has the slowest average speed of just 6.2 Mbps while Airtel is the fastest at 11.4 Mbps.
Jio is at the bottom with Idea, Vodafone and Airtel all leading the table. Even in upload speeds, Jio comes at the fourth spot behind all incumbent players, but doing slightly better that Reliance 4G.
There are a few things to keep in mind, Airtel, Idea and Vodafone still don't have a pan-India 4G network, they are still in the process of rolling out while Jio went live almost for the entire country at the same time. Therefore, we may see connectivity issues plaguing the network in some regions. Bit there is no doubt that speeds have decreased by at least 3/4 ever since the welcome offer came into play. This doesn't bode well for Jio, especially when millions more are still to join the network.
Call drops have been another issue which Jio has been blaming on Airtel, Idea and Vodafone for which TRAI has suggested a fine of 3050 crores on the incumbent carriers. But calls to even Reliance numbers don't get through with Jio, something which they should explain.
Now, Jio did try to clear up the fact that the speed test results may be a bit skewed given the 4GB FUP limit for users. According to Jio spokesperson, they have monitored speeds on their network and people generally ran speed tests after their FUP data allowance was over to check speed. This would result in lowering the average data download speed for the network. Although this does make sense, its true not just for Jio but for other networks as well.
There's a lot of work Jio needs to put into its network before I am switching over to it with my primary number.
