India slips down to 78 in fixed broadband speed ranking, report

India slipped down seven places in the global ranking for fastest fixed broadband download speeds in the world, shows data revealed by internet speed tracker Ookla for the month of August. India’s rank in August was 78 as compared to 71 in July, even though overall fixed download speeds increased marginally from 48.04Mbps in July to 48.29Mbps in August. 

In mobile broadband speeds, India’s positions remained unchanged at 117. The median mobile download speeds also grew from 13.41Mbps to 13.52Mbps between July and August.

Norway recorded the highest mobile download speeds of 122.7Mbps while Singapore had the best fixed broadband download speed of 219Mbps.

India’s broadband speeds are lower than the global average. According to Ookla, the global average for mobile and fixed broadband download speeds was 30.79Mbps and 69.14Mbps, respectively.  

Further, the data shows that latency in mobile broadband in India was 36 milliseconds (ms), which was slightly more than the global average of 29ms. In fixed broadband, latency in India was only 7ms as compared to the global average of 10ms. Latency is the time taken for data to travel from a source to the endpoint. Higher latency can impact the performance of networks and applications running on them.  

China (178.73Mbps) and the US (167.36Mbps) were ranked fifth and sixth, respectively, in fixed broadband download speeds. In mobile broadband speeds, China was ranked ninth, while the US was ranked 24.

According to a July report by the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and consulting firm Kantar, India has 692 million active Internet users, which is expected to grow to 900 million by 2025.

Internet speeds and latency in India are expected to improve with the rollout to 5G services, which is likely to start next month. Both Airtel and Reliance Jio are planning to roll out 5G services in October.