Smartphone penetration in India may be growing at the fastest rate but 4G speed in the country has not kept up with this growth. India has the lowest download speed in the world on 4G, averaging at much less than 10 Mbps. It is lower than most of its south Asian peers—Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mynamar and even Pakistan, says a new report by Open Signal, a mobile analytics company.
Even as telecom companies are fighting each other over rolling out 4G services and there is a cut-throat competition on pricing, the speed seems to be way behind. Singapore, Netherlands, Norway and South Korea have the highest internet speeds, in the range of 40-45 Mbps.
4G speed depends on several factors factors—the amount of spectrum devoted to LTE, whether it has adopted new 4G technologies like LTE Advanced, how densely networks are built and how much congestion is on those networks. The report says that countries with fastest speeds tend to be ones that have built LTE-Advanced networks and have a large proportion of LTE-Advanced capable devices.
In India, the access to 4G is among the highest, which means that it is available most of the time. But networks lacked the capacity to deliver connection speeds faster than 3G technologies.
The problem has been worsened because of debt overload on telecom companies. Shrinking profits and large debt obligations have made companies reluctant to invest in network infrastructure or augment capacities.
A few month ago, telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan had said that the government is aware of the slow internet speed available to users in many parts of the country and that the speeds promised by 3G and 4G networks nowhere meet the actual speeds received by the consumers.
The issue is crucial as the country gears up for a pan India 5G roll out along with the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) focused applications.