Reliance Jio topped the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) 4G mobile data speed test in 2017. According to the latest Trai numbers, Jio recorded a mobile data (4G) download speed of 19.4 Mbps in December, 2017, which is also the operator’s 12th consecutive month at the top.
However, the speed in December was lower compared with that achieved by it in November, when it clocked 25.6 Mbps, which is also its highest in the 2017 calendar year.
It’s not just Jio, the mobile data speeds of other operators also went down during December.
Bharti Airtel clocked a speed of 9.4 Mbps in December, which is slightly lower than the 9.8 Mbps it achieved in November. Similarly, Vodafone India’s speed declined to 8.9 Mbps in December against 10 Mbps a month earlier. The mobile data speed of Idea Cellular remained flat in December at 7 Mbps compared with November.
On an average, Jio clocked a mobile data speed of around 19.5 Mbps during 2017, followed by Vodafone at 9.8 Mbps, Idea at 9.7 Mbps and Bharti at 9.3 Mbps.
The regulator is in the process of reviewing the mobile data speed methodology and came out with a white paper last month on the methodology, approach and evaluation criteria for its MySpeed app, which measures mobile data speeds of telecom operators through crowd sourcing.
The white paper, which analysed test set-up and methodologies behind working of the app, concluded that collecting more data to validate test results like radio access technology (RAT), distance of user from the base transreceiver station (BTS), etc can help is providing more insights on data speeds. The paper analysed speed test results for the August-October 2017 period.
In 2017, the mobile data speed issue witnessed Bharti and Jio indulging in a bitter war of words. Jio last year complained to the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) about Bharti’s TV commercial claiming it as “officially” the fastest network. The advertising watchdog asked Bharti to remove the ad, which the operator did.