4G in metro cities face speed issues due to congested networks; telcos blame RoW

DELHI: Consumers in India’s metro and bigger cities are facing ever slowing data speeds and frequent call drops, with congestion in telecom networks running at around 85-90% of capacity and still struggling to cope with the surging consumption of data, driven by low prices.

Average data consumption jumped to 9.5 GB a user from 2.5 GB while voice consumption surged to 820 minutes per user from 400 minutes last year. Voice calls are increasingly being routed as data calls. But the industry only managed to install 50,000-60,000 cell sites in 2018 compared with the need for over 100,000 cell sites to keep pace, industry experts said.