Idea beats Airtel in 4G speed wars; Jio rules the charts

4G speed wars between telecom companies like Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have reached a peak with the former claiming to be fastest network in India and the latter complaining about the veracity of the massive campaign to the advertising council of India. However, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data show that it is indeed Idea Cellular that has stolen the show. 

TRAI's MySpeed portal show that Reliance Jio continues to be the fastest 4G network in India with average speeds of 15.04 mbps, followed by Idea and Airtel at 11.93 mbps and 10.69 mbps, respectively. 

Vodafone and Reliance Communications provided average 4G speeds of 8.1 mbps and 3.9 mbps, TRAI data show. 

When looked at on a monthly basis, Reliance Jio has made maximum gains from average speed of 8.34 mbps on January 1, 2017 to 16.48 mbps on March 1, 2017. 

Idea Cellular, on the other hand, bypassed Bharti Airtel and increased its average 4G speed from 10.56 mbps to 12.09 mbps in the given time as against 11.86 mbps to 10.43 mbps of Airtel. 

It was in March 2017 that Airtel launched its massive advertising campaign claiming to be fastest network in India as certified by global agency Ookla. 

TRAI said, " The results represent the average of the data speed samples collected from various consumers of the TSPs on a crowd sourcing basis during speed test initiated by them over the last 3 months and the monthly trends are updated on the 1st of every month."