HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, March 4: Ookla released its insights on India’s performance post-launch of 5G services on Saturday. According to the insights, the median download speeds across India increased by 115% (from a 13.87 Mbps median download speed in September 2022 to 29.85 Mbps in January 2023). As a result, India’s position on the Speedtest Global Index improved by 49 places from 118th in September 2022 to 69th in January 2023. This puts India ahead of some of the G20 countries, such as Mexico, Russia, and Argentina, and its neighbours including Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.
Speedtest Intelligence data also shows that 5G Availability – the proportion of users with 5G-capable devices that use 5G network – had increased 55 times between September 2022, when 5G Availability stood at 0.1%, and January 2023, when it reached 5.5%. Operators already have an existing base of consumers owning 5G-capable devices. During the latest quarterly call, Airtel shared that about 11% of their smartphones are 5G ready. Airtel users with 5G smartphones can access Airtel 5G Plus services at no additional cost using their existing 4G SIM cards. Airtel is busy carrying out a 5G network rollout, planning to go live in about 300 cities by March 2023 and to cover all urban areas by March 2024.
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The report also infers the churning pattern of Speedtest users from January to December 2022, which shows that Vi India has been losing users throughout 2022 and following the 5G launch, the disconnections increased significantly. Most of Vi’s customers have moved away to Jio and Airtel.
