Even below Pak! India's 4G speed is three times slower than global average

India ranked 74 out of 75 countries when it came to speed.

Even though India has reached the 15th spot in 4G availability globally, the average download speed of 5.1 Mbps in the country is less than a third of the global average and only marginally higher than the global 3G speed of 4.4 Mbps, revealed a report by OpenSignal,  a London-based wireless coverage mapping company.

In fact, all of India's operators fell well short of the 17.4 Mbps global average for 4G download speed.

Download speeds in India have dropped more than one megabit per second in the last six months as traffic has surged, mainly on the back of Reliance Jio Infocomm’s free services.

"Jio's nationwide 4G launch in September attracted 100 million LTE subscribers, making 4G services far more accessible in India but at the expense of lower average speeds," said the report.

 India, which ranked 74th out of 75 countries, came below the likes of Pakistan and Sri Lanka and just ahead of Costa Rica in terms of speed. 

"But while signals may be plentiful in India, capacity isn't. India has some of the slowest LTE speeds in the world," the report added.

Singapore scored the highest in 4G speed while South Korea scored highest in 4G availability. The global average 4G download speed was 16.2 Mbps. 

For its report, OpenSignal collected data from regular consumer smartphones under conditions of normal usage and covered 75 countries.

Mobile data explosion driven by the Jio launch and freebies or promotional offers by incumbent telcos, is putting huge pressure on mobile network infrastructure which results in low speeds. 

You can view the entire report here