India

Opensignal’s data shows that short-term variations in average mobile data consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with variations in our users’ average Download Speed Experience across multiple countries. In part, this is because other ways of improving capacity such as additional wireless spectrum, could not be brought into use quickly in most countries to help with changed mobile usage.

Opensignal has analyzed the experience of our users across Singtel group’s mobile operator subsidiaries and regional associates — where Singtel owns a proportion of the company — to see how they differ in Download Speed, Voice App and Video Experience.

On Friday 3 May, Eastern India was battered by Cyclone Fani, one of the strongest storms to hit the country in the last 20 years. The cyclone made landfall near Puri, a popular destination for pilgrims and tourists, with gusts of wind reaching 190 km/h, before heading  north-north-eastwards and finally dying down.

The city of Dhanbad is known as the coal capital of India, and is headquarters of some of the country's biggest coking companies in the mineral-rich Jharkhand state. And now Dhanbad is on fire as Opensignal's hottest city for 4G Availability.

OpenSignal has measured 4G download speeds across 20 of India's largest cities and observed that smartphone users experience varying speeds depending on the city they live in: while Navi Mumbai scored 8.1 Mbps in average LTE download speed in our measurements, Allahabad came last with an average of 4.0 Mbps – half the speed.