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Is Your Phone’s 4G Making Your Life Difficult? Here’s Why Even Switching Networks Won’t Help

Wondering why our collective networks fail us repeatedly?

It’s been established that Indians do not shy away from consuming large amounts of data. Recent reports claim that we spend 200 minutes (on an average) on mobile apps every single day. On an average, we consume 4GB data every month.

“India crossed 400 million Internet users, with 330 million connected smartphone users. Today, an average connected mobile user in India consumes 4GB of data every month,” Google India Head Rajan Anandan Anandan said at the Google for India 2017 event.

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To back up the claim that India’s love affair with mobile internet is growing exponentially, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant tweeted a few months ago that India was consuming 150 crore gigabytes (GB). Kant claimed that our country was now ranked first in the world for using mobile data more than the United States and China put together.

Amazing! With 150 cr gigabytes per month of mobile data consumption India is now world’s no 1 mobile data consuming country. It’s mobile data consumption is higher than USA & China’s mobile data consumption put together.

— Amitabh Kant (@amitabhk87) December 22, 2017

If that is the case and our data consumption is indeed increasing, then why do our collective networks fail us most of the time when it comes to speed? Are you also bewildered and wondering whether switching to a different network will alleviate your network troubles?

Well, you shouldn’t. According to a recent research released by the data analytics firm OpenSignal, India is ranked 14th in the world for 4G accessibility.

The map shows mobile networking capabilities. The regions that are darker have better 4G speed. Credit: OpenSignal

Our country has access to mobile networks 86.26% of the time. “India’s 4G networks lacked the capacity to deliver connection speeds much faster than 3G technologies,” a Quartz report quoted the OpenSignal research.

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OpenSignal decoded the network capabilities of 87 different countries after reviewing 19 billion samples collected by 1 million OpenSignal users across the world. According to this Quartz report, the samples collected between October 01 and December 29, 2017, were studied after which the report was published.

At the rate we are consuming data, experts claim that we will soon be using 11 GB every month, 7 GB more than we are currently consuming. But if we take the research into consideration, it’ll clearly be a long time before our browsing woes are over.