Airtel beats Vodafone Idea and Jio in network quality, other metrics: Tutela

In the latest Tutela Mobile Experience Snapshot for India, Airtel won in four of the five metrics tested including the highest Excellent Consistent Quality and fastest median download speeds, while Vodafone Idea had the fastest median upload speeds in the country.

In Common Coverage Areas across India, Airtel had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality with 55.4% of connections having a network experience suitable for use-cases like 1080p video streaming, real-time mobile gaming or HD video calling.

With a difference in performance of 6.9%, Vodafone Idea was in second place, followed by Jio with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 45.1%. The operator BSNL Mobile had the lowest Excellent Consistent Quality in India at only 14.0%, 41.4% difference between first place Airtel and BSNL.

No operator in Common Coverage Areas across India reached the 90% threshold for Core Consistent Quality, representing connections with a network experience suitable for use-cases like SD video streaming, social media sharing and web browsing.

However, Airtel had the highest Core Consistent Quality at 83.0%, followed by Jio at 77.9%, and Vodafone Idea at 73.8%. BSNL Mobile had the lowest Core Consistent Quality at 48.5%, 34.5% difference between the operator and first place Airtel.

In Common Coverage Areas across India, Airtel had the fastest median download speed at 10.0 Mbps, however there was strong competition from Vodafone Idea with a median download speed of 9.4 Mbps. Jio was in third place with a median download speed of 6.5 Mbps, followed by BSNL Mobile at 2.8 Mbps, 7.2 Mbps slower than Airtel.

For upload speeds, Vodafone Idea took first place with a median speed of 5.1 Mbps, followed by Airtel at 4.2 Mbps, Jio with 3.4 Mbps, and BSNL Mobile in fourth place with a median upload speed of 1.7 Mbps, 3.4 Mbps slower than Vodafone Idea.

In the latency test, there was strong competition between Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Jio: Airtel had the most responsive network in Common Coverage Areas across India with 24.0 ms, however only 4.5 ms separated third place Jio from that top spot and only 2.5 ms difference between Airtel and Vodafone Idea.

BSNL Mobile had the least responsive network at 49.1 ms, a difference in performance of 25.1 ms.

Tutela said its findings for India are based on 615 billion network quality measurements including 62.9 million speed tests between August and October 2020.