Revisiting the State of Cellular Data Connectivity in India

The count of mobile Internet users in India has been growing at a rate of 27% annually and is expected to reach 300M by 2017. There is however limited understanding of whether this rapid growth is happening while also ensuring that good quality of service is provided to users. To find out, we deployed a measurement framework in 20 rural, semi-urban, and urban sites in North India and probed four leading 2G and 3G telecom providers to measure performance metrics such as availability, throughput and latency. We also observed some design and configuration aspects of cellular networks that affect the quality of service perceived by users. Our results point to many instances where misconfigurations or inadequate provisioning or poor monitoring of cellular networks led to significantly low performance provided to users. We are now using these results to argue for more robust QoS regulation in the country, and show how the current regulations for 2G and 3G services are not sufficient to hold providers accountable for the quality of service provided by them.