Bharti Airtel has come closer to challenging 4G market leader Reliance Jio which continues to reign supreme on 4G availability and 4G coverage experience in India, says Opensignal.
While the average proportion of time that Reliance Jio users spent connected to 4G network has increased by 0.5 of a percentage point since the last report to reach 98.7 percent, Airtel saw its score increase by 1.1 percentage points.

As a consequence, Jio’s lead has dropped from 3.7 percentage points to 3.1, said the report on Monday.

In regional analysis of 49 cities, Airtel came close to challenging Jio’s dominance on 4G availability in a majority of the cities although Jio continued to win almost all awards.

While Jio won in 48 cities outright it drew for the first place with Airtel in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

However, for the second report in a row, Airtel has won four of the awards outright — video experience, games experience, voice app experience and download Speed experience, while ownership of the upload speed experience award smoothly passed from Vodafone to Vi.

Opensignal has examined the mobile network experience of the four main mobile network operators in India: Airtel, BSNL, Jio and Vi over a period of 90 days beginning May 1 to see how they fared, and delved deeper into 49 of India’s largest cities, comparing the experience users received on these four operators.