Reliance Jio’s cut-throat pricing strategy may be hurting its rivals in India, but the associated boost in LTE coverage helped the country shoot up global rankings for LTE availability during Q1, OpenSignal revealed.

The coverage mapping company said India ranked in 15th place in measurements of LTE availability in 75 countries, compared with 24th place in its last analysis covering Q3 2016. The company said Reliance Jio helped boost availability of LTE services in India, after signing up 100 million subscribers in five months after its launch in September 2016.

As a result, LTE availability in India increased from 71.6 per cent in Q3 2016 to 81.6 per cent in the recent period.

OpenSignal took around 19.6 billion measurements from 558,260 Android and iOS smartphones running its app during the opening quarter of 2016.

While the research showed India was one of the fastest growing countries in terms of LTE availability, OpenSignal’s rankings were again topped by South Korea and Japan with LTE coverage of more than 96 per cent and 93 per cent respectively.

Norway was the leading market in Europe and third overall, with 87 per cent availability.

The US rose from tenth place in Q3 2016 to fourth in Q1 2017 as availability increased from 81 per cent to 87 per cent. Kuwait was the highest placed country in the Middle East with LTE availability of 83 per cent placing the country in 12th place overall, Mexico topped Central America on 69 per cent (35th place), and Peru scored highest in South America with 67 per cent availability (37th).

Need for speed
While users were able to access the technology for a greater proportion of time, the average worldwide download speed fell from 17.4Mb/s recorded in Q3 2016 to 16.2Mb/s in Q1 2017.

OpenSignal attributed the decline to new deployments in several countries delivering speeds closer to those associated with 3G, which dragged down the global average. For example, typical speeds in India stood at 5.14Mb/s in the January to March period.

Despite the overall fall, OpenSignal found early adopters continued to improve their networks.

During the first quarter, 15 countries delivered an average speed above 30Mb/s, including New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands. This compares with 11 in Q3 2016. The fastest average speeds in the recent period were recorded in Singapore, South Korea, Hungary and Norway, which all logged rates of more than 40Mb/s.