Wireless coverage mapping firm OpenSignal has found huge variations in 4G download speeds, depending on the city and time of the day. The company, which has analysed 20 Indian cities, found that the download speed increases up to 4.5 times at night. In fact, at 4 am, speeds will be the fastest, while 10 pm will be the slowest hour.
As per the report, users’ experience different speeds across the hours of the day. When the mobile network is the busiest, the average 4G download speed drops 2.8 Mbps compared to the daily average, with users in Allahabad experiencing the slowest 4G download speed at 2 Mbps. On the other hand, when the network is less congested, download speeds jump on an average by 10.3 Mbps, with Indore hitting the highest speed of 21.6 Mbps and all of the 20 cities above 14 Mbps. The cities analysed by OpenSignal include Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.

All the cities show a similar trend with download speeds tending to decrease over the course of the day, reaching the slowest speed in the late evening at 10 pm, when presumably most smartphone users are connected to the network accessing entertainment services such as mobile video. Then, speeds improve sharply to an early morning peak at 4 am – when most people are asleep – and finally start falling again as people wake up and use their phones. READ ALSO | Modi’s direct tax overhaul at work: Relief for taxpayer, small businesses on cards as election looms However, the level of variation differs in various cities. Hyderabad has the most consistent speeds and Allahabad sees the highest variance. During congested times, users across all cities had a much slower experience, with 4G download speed ranging from 2.5 Mbps to 5.6 Mbps — a 3.1 Mbps difference — while in less congested hours the speeds experienced increased by approximately 9.8 Mbps to range from 9.9 Mbps to 19.7 Mbps.
OpenSignal’s results suggest that network congestion is one of the main reasons behind smartphone users experiencing relatively slow average 4G download speeds. “We observed that Indian cities face different degrees of congestion and that users experience speeds over 20 Mbps at quiet times. But this only occurs in the middle of the night: in the daytime, the large number of connected devices erodes the networks’ capacity and adversely affects the mobile network experience,” the report said.

Source: financialexpress.com