India’s s-s-s-stalling 3G networks are f-f-f-fr-frustrating

In the past two years or so most telcos in India have rolled out 3G networks in varying proportions across the country. Mostly, 3G is available only in metro or urban areas like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai. Even in those top cities, 3G users often complain about bad network connectivity or congestion, low bandwidth, and slow data speed when trying to stream videos.

In fact, Skyfire, the browser maker now owned by Opera, has figures and evidence to back up people’s gripes about lousy 3G.

India’s mobile networks are struggling with an explosion of mobile video traffic. 83 percent of video users experience stalling videos, according to Skyfire’s mobile data report. Through extensive testing, the study found that more than half (56 percent) of video consumers on India’s 3G networks suffer from significant hiccups and re-buffering, causing frustration and a drop in HD video usage among users.

Buffering…

Technically, HD videos demand five to 10 times higher bandwidth on mobile devices. The auto-play videos within Vine and Instagram use a higher bit-rate (900-1300 kbps) so they can play smoothly and clearly. That’s a big challenge on some 3G networks.

However, 56 percent of videos on India’s 3G networks experience playback issues given the data rate and this leads to “significant stalling,” reveals the study. Moreover, 40 percent of all video streams ran at bit-rates of less than 300 kbps, a very low speed for video playback on mobile devices using 3G networks.

If this is the situation on 3G networks, than there’s no telling how bad the situation could be for 2G users. On 2G, over 99 percent of users experienced at least some stalling on videos.

Video set to be 60% of mobile traffic

According to Cisco’s 2013 Visual Networking Index, mobile data traffic in India is projected to reach a whopping 900 petabytes per month by 2017, with 60 percent of that data coming from mobile video alone.

Based on the new mobile data study, Sunil Kamath, Opera Software’s vice president for South Asia, pointed out that video consumption in India is growing rapidly and it is causing congestion as well as a bad user experience on phones and tablets. He observed that telcos should implement cost-effective and quick-to-market solutions to enhance the end-user mobile video streaming experience. Kamath added:

Indian operators have the opportunity to couple their regional LTE rollouts with mobile video optimization to expand capacity across 2G, 3G and 4G networks nationwide.

Though some large telcos have upgraded their network infrastructure to 3G technology, the fact still remains there’s an absence of fully complete 3G networks across operators for the whole of India. And subscribers can easily see on their mobile devices how network connectivity fluctuates from 3G to 2G and vice-versa while accessing the internet.

Check out the full Skyfire mobile data study.

(Editing by Steven Millward)