Is 4G truly 4G in India or just a gimmick?

4G LTE has become the talk of the tinsel town lately. The demand for high-speed internet on mobile devices led a massive revolution in the telecom industry as well as the smartphone arena, where OEMs are forced to launch phones with 4G VoLTE bands.

Reliance Jio, which popularised 4G in India through its free giveaways, along with Airtel and other telcos are combating with each other to gain higher number of subscribers. But at what cost? It looks like the growing amount of users on 4G network is hampering the speeds, which has affected India's ranking on a global scale.

The battle between Airtel and Reliance Jio is a fierce one. Both telcos are snapping at each other with offers and taunts in the coveted 4G LTE war. While Reliance Jio has the largest 4G availability in India, Airtel takes the lead in offering fastest 4G download speed. The contribution of both telcos seems significant, but users are still not experiencing true 4G in India.

Reliance Jio's rapid growth helped Indian rank 15 in global 4G availability, but the speeds aren't really up to the mark. India's average 4G download speed is measured at 5.1Mbps, which is slightly faster than global 3G speed of 4.4Mbps and less than a third of the global average 4G download speed, according to a report by OpenSignal.

But that doesn't mean all telcos in India have slow 4G speeds. Airtel, which ranked number one, has an average download connection of 11.5Mbps. Vodafone and Idea Cellular reached an average of more than 8Mbps. The most disruptive telco – Reliance Jio - came in fourth with an average download speed of 3.9Mbps.

"Ironically the limited speeds we find in our Jio tests can be explained by Jio's success. Networks are shared resources with a limited amount of capacity. The more users connecting to a network, the more individual connection speeds suffer. Jio garnered 100 million subscribers in a space of six months, and it gave those customers nearly free reign to consume as much data as they liked. Such a huge onslaught of 4G data usage would tax any network, no matter how powerful," OpenSignal report said.

In our individual testing, IBTimes, India, learned that Airtel indeed had a faster 4G speed as compared to Reliance Jio. Take a look at the speed test conducted by IBTimes below:

This was concluded by OpenSignal based on over 1.3 billion measurements conducted by over 93,000 smartphone users between December 1, 2016 and February 28, 2017.

With significant 4G outreach, India still lags in speed

Some individual telcos such as Airtel are delivering exceptional quality of service, but the average 4G download speed across India is not just as great. India ranked 74 out of 75 countries in the race to deliver fastest download speed around the world. In India, the average 4G download speed is measured at 5.1Mbps as compared to the global average of 17.4Mbps.

The significant difference between India and the rest of the world is due to data traffic surge, caused by Reliance Jio's freebies and offers by other telcos. After all, a report from last October revealed that Jio's 4G network witnessed a whopping 16,000TB worth data consumption on a daily basis, which even surpassed China Mobile's 12,000TB/day limit.

According to OpenSignal's report, download speeds in India dropped more than 1Mbps in the last six months due to surge in traffic. India's average data usage rose from 236 MB a month in September to 884 MB in December 2016.