South states show better net connectivity & higher download speeds: Report

India improved rankings on Speedtest Global Index in mobile download speed category by three places to 109 and fixed broadband download category by two places to 67 in the February 2018 edition of the report as compared to the previous month.

The report also found an improvement in mobile and fixed broadband download speed when compared with last year. The average mobile download speed has improved to 9.01 Mbps in February this year. In January 2017, it stood at 7.65 Mbps. Similarly, the average fixed broadband download speed has improved to 20.72 Mbps in the latest report as compared to 12.12 Mbps in January last year.

Norway and Singapore remained unbeaten champions in the mobile and fixed broadband speed tests, respectively.

The overall speed improvement comes in addition to the massive rural connectivity following the Bharat Net initiative.

The glaring difference, however, is in the download speeds across the top cities in India. Southern states on an average showed higher download speeds. Chennai (download speed 32.67 Mbps) and Bengaluru (31.09 Mbps) scored much higher than Delhi (23.57 Mbps) and Kolkata (20.39 Mbps). Mumbai scored the least among top cities at a download speed of 17.1 Mbps. Chennai’s download speed of over 32.67 Mbps for fixed broadband is 57.7 per cent faster than the rest of the country’s average.

Coming to the performance of different states, residents of Karnataka enjoyed the fastest speed in India, with a mean download speed of 28.46 Mbps during the month of February, which is 37.4 per cent faster than the rest of the country. Tamil Nadu is a close second at 27.94 Mbps. Mizoram reported the slowest with a mean download speed of 3.62 Mbps in February, which is 82.5 per cent slower than the rest of India.

This improvement is in alignment with Ookla’s announcement at the end of 2017 which said India had reported most improvement in fixed broadband download speeds among the world’s most populous countries.

Patna is by far the slowest city compared to the rest of the country, with speeds averaging 62.4% slower than the country’s average. Besides Patna, download speeds in Kanpur, Lucknow, Pune and Nagpur are significantly lower than that of their respective states.