5G speeds in India hitting 500 Mbps on test networks: Ookla report

Earlier this month, during the India Mobile Congress 2022, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio announced that they will be launching 5G services in select cities in the country. Now, Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence report suggests that 5G speeds in the country have reached 500 Mbps on test networks.
The report suggests that during the 5G testing phase last month, they witnessed speeds as low as 16.27 Mbps and as high as 809.94 Mbps. which meant telecom providers were still calibrating their networks. The Ookla Speedtest Intelligence report compared the median 5G download speeds across four cities where both Jio and Airtel are available.
In Delhi, Airtel 5G had a median speed of nearly 200 Mbps whereas Jio had a median speed of 600 Mbps. In the city of Kolkata, Airtel’s median download speed was just 33.83 Mbps while Jio had download speeds of 482.02 Mbps. Coming to Mumbai, Airtel has a median download speed of 271.07 Mbps but Jio had 515.38 Mbps. The only city Airtel and Jio came in close was Varanasi, where Airtel had a 516.57 Mbps median speed compared to Jio’s 485.22 Mbps.

While the speeds are much higher when compared to 4G LTE, the company’s Speedtest Global Index report ranked India at 117 with an average 13.52 mobile download speed. But this might change in the near future as 5G rolls out across the country.
Ookla’s recent consumer survey also reveals that 89 per cent of Indian smartphone users are all set to upgrade their devices to 5G.
Data from Ookla’s Speedtest app users suggests that Jio witnessed the largest increase with over 67.4 per cent of phones already 5G capable (67.4 per cent), which was closely followed Airtel at 61.6 per cent and Vodafone-Idea at 56 per cent.