Opinion: Why India has slower Internet speed than Pakistan

Slow internet speed is something we all dread. Don’t we always look for reasonable speeds so that we can watch videos without any buffer and we can browse better and get a fast digital life? But sadly, when it comes to 4G speed, we in India are far away from what the world is experiencing. The 4G speed in India is not just poor, it’s the slowest in the world. In fact, Pakistan offers better 4G speed than India. 

A new report from the mobile analytics company Opensignal,  reveals surprising results about the 4G trend in India and across the globe.

According to the Opensignal's report, 4G download speed in India happens to be the slowest across 88 countries. 

The average 4G speed in India has been calculated at 6 Mbps. The actual experience, however, could be even lower.

In fact, people in Pakistan enjoy faster internet with an average 4G speed of 14 Mbps.

In fact, India scored a little better in November last year. But the rank has now gone down. In November, India was found to be offering an average 4G download speed of 6.13 Mbps, which has now declined to 6.07 Mbps.

 It’s just not India, other countries like Algeria, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand rank among the top 5 countries with slowest 4G speeds.

On the other hand, Singapore, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and Hungary have been listed as top 5 countries that offer the fastest downloads on 4G.

Opensignal has found that in the fastest countries, the average LTE download speeds have got stalled at 45 Mbps. In other words, no country has yet been able to crack the 50 Mbps mark.

Top 5 countries with slowest 4g speeds

India: 6.07 Mbps
Algeria: 8.65 Mbps
Indonesia: 8.92 Mbps
Philippines: 9.49 Mbps
Thailand: 9.60 Mbps

Top 5 countries with fastest 4g speeds

Singapore: 44.31 Mbps
Netherlands: 42.12 Mbps
Norway: 41.20 Mbps
South Korea: 40.44 Mbps
Hungary: 39.18 Mbps

While India may be offering poor 4G speeds, but it is interesting to note that the country has a wide reach. 4G is available in India for around 86 per cent of the time people access the internet. But it’s time to pull up the socks. It’s time that India maintained a good balance between the reach and the speed. After all, 4G plays an instrumental role in making India a digital India. 

Now that we know India has the slowest 4G speed in the world, it becomes important to understand the reasons behind such a poor performance. But before you hold telecom operators alone responsible for it, let’s understand that there is more to than what meets the eye. There are a lot of factors that cause patchy connections and lead to substandard internet speeds in India.

There is a huge spike in data demand. Smartphones have redefined the way we use the internet. As a result, 4G networks are lacking the capacity to deliver faster connection speeds. In other words, companies have been failing to match the growing consumer demand. 

It has been discovered that the telecom sector is in a deep financial mess. Mobile operators, therefore, seem to be slow in making investments and upgrading infrastructure. Telecom companies have been found to be facing problems in laying optical fibre that ensures high-speed connections. Also deploying new towers remains a challenge for operators. 

Also, when it comes to the internet speed, the standard in India has been kept pretty low by the country's regulatory body. While TRAI is in the process of revising the speed by 4 times, the low benchmark is observed to be as another reason that is causing poor internet speeds in India.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)