At Twin Prime, our GLAS (Global Location based Acceleration Strategies) database processes billions of network requests to arrive at insights about network performance. Understanding which factors impact performance is key to dealing with mobile performance issues, and our data exemplifies how variability determines mobile performance.

Impending LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network upgrade may outperform WiFi

Most people will say they perceive WiFi to be better than cellular networks, because WiFi is more reliable and faster than cellular – our first Insights blog showed that this is not the case with LTE in many cities globally. How about India?

In India, LTE adoption is just beginning to ramp up – the share of LTE traffic among requests seen by Twin Prime in India is around 2%. But if early trends are an indicator, LTE performs better than WiFi in major metros. Hyderabad lives up to its tech reputation and beats other metros.









The speed chart presented above computes median download speeds for files in the range of 30–60KB (a popular choice of size for downloaded content in India) across hundreds of millions of samples.

With LTE, India could be ready for video on cellular

A good quality video (for example, 480p video) requires 1.5 Mbps download speeds over large file sizes. Analyzing about a million samples leads us to conclude that LTE is well positioned to deliver video. The download speeds presented here are for files larger than 200KB since we are interested in sustained speeds achieved over longer connection durations.

Summary

We analyzed hundreds of millions of measurements related to network performance in India. We see that LTE is off to a great start and Hyderabad does deserve its “Cyberabad” nickname! Recent reports that forecast a significant growth in LTE devices in India is great news for customers looking to experience rich media such as videos. This is a great opportunity and a challenge for India’s booming m-commerce, travel, dating, and other such mobile businesses.

About the author:

Satish Raghunath, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Twin Prime Inc., has more than 15 years of experience in network software design, holding technical and engineering positions at leading networking companies including Juniper Networks and Nortel Networks. At Juniper Networks, Satish was instrumental in improving router technology and contributing to the development of a cross-company services platform. Satish holds a PhD in computer networking from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and his work has been published in several IEEE publications.

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