Higher number of users strain 5G speeds in India; Reliance Jio negatively impacted: Opensignal

The rapid deployment of 5G pan-India is coming under strain as more and more users connect to the latest mobile networks, according to an Opensignal report, which says that the country’s top telecom operator Reliance Jio’s 5G performance has been negatively impacted compared to rival Bharti Airtel.

“Given the additional load on the 5G network both in terms of the number of subscribers and data traffic, not surprisingly, India’s national 5G download speed score decreased from 304Mbps in Q1 2023 to 280.7Mbps in Q4 2023,” Sylwia Kechiche, Senior Director of Industry Analysis at Opensignal, said in a recent report.

The network and analysis firm said that India’s 5G customer base has increased to 180 million, with the majority being on Jio’s 5G network (108 million) and the rest of 72 million on Airtel’s 5G network.

GSMA Intelligence predicts that 5G connections will grow further, exceeding 260 million in Q4 2025 and accounting for 22% of all connections.

Opensignal noted that both Jio and Airtel provide commercial 5G services at the same pricing as 4G, along with unlimited 5G data, which in turn, is driving data traffic growth.

Jio has previously said that 5G traffic is now approaching 30% of the mobility data traffic.

Opensignal cited Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data, which found that data consumption using 5G surged to 12.6% in Q4 2023, corresponding to 6239 petabytes.

To address this issue, Airtel is focusing on investing in 5G capacity and has stopped such investments for its 4G network. The Sunil Mittal-led telco is deploying a 5G nonstandalone (NSA) network, whereas Jio is deploying a 5G standalone (SA) network.

The 5G base station count in India reached 4.46 lakh in May 2024, equating to 31 5G base stations per 1 lakh inhabitants, said Opensignal. By contrast, in South Korea, this proportion is 593, and across the European Union, 103, pointing to the fact that “these are still areas where the 5G network has to be built up in India”, it added.

The comparison of Jio and Airtel’s 5G network performance has revealed that the latter has improved across all telecom circles, barring Punjab, Mumbai, and Delhi. Nationally, the average 5G download speeds seen by Airtel’s users have increased from 260.4Mbps in Q1 2023 to 273.6Mbps in Q1 2024, as per the report. Over the same period, Airtel’s 5G availability grew from 12.5% to 20.7%.

5G availability is the proportion of time Opensignal users with a 5G device and a 5G subscription have an active 5G connection.

On the other hand, the network analysis firm found that Jio’s 5G download speed stood at 261.8Mbps in Q1 2024 compared to 323.6Mbps in Q1 2023, and its users experienced a similar decrease at a circle level, too. The most negatively impacted were 5G users in Uttar Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal.

However, nationally, Jio’s 5G availability increased from 34.9% in Q1 2023 to 64.9% in Q1 2024. “The reason is that as Jio scales across the country, it increasingly leverages low-band spectrum — the proportion of 5G readings we collected when our users were connected to Jio’s 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands has almost doubled from nearly 10% in Q1 2023 to over 18% in Q1 2024,” Kechiche said.

Jio is the only telco in India with access to 700MHz low-band spectrum.