Review: Airtel 4G Experience on Mobile

 

Airtel and Reliance Jio have introduced 4G technology in India, they launched 4G dongle and routers but not on mobile devices. Touch down time for 4G/ LTE- TDD technology on to handheld devices has arrived, it is just another four to eight months away. Airtel is likely to launch 4G on devices in next two to three months - it has built the capabilities but the roll out is on hold due to the final round of field testing.

Here, we bring you Airtel's 4G service pre-launch updates from Bengaluru.

Stunning Experience!

Watching live streaming of videos gets mind boggling on 4G. There was just less than a seconds of buffering initially. Videos of around 11MB to 100MB HD quality got downloaded at a blink of an eye.

A video of 11.2MB, 70MB and 576 MB were download in 35 seconds, 30 seconds and 5 minutes respectively.

As known, download and upload speeds are proportional to good device capabilities, location, time of usage, signal strength and the content being uploaded/ downloaded / live streaming. When we tested 4G service on Sony Experia Ion device via iPhone WiFi Hotspot, it delivered 24.65 mbps and 8.25 mbps download and upload speed respectively. The same device offered over 19.59 mbps download and 7.65 mbps upload speed when 3 devices were connected to wifi hotspot.

On Samsung Galaxy tab 2, the download speed was 7.57 mbps and upload speed was 5.93 mbps while downloading a movie of 576 MB. On the same device, the download showed 29.12 and 9.66 download and upload speeds while download a music video of 70MB.

Uploading is very faster, two high quality pictures can be uploaded in two minutes.

Got to Juggle

Yes, it is slightly juggling, as the 4G experience is not constant throughout India's Silicon Valley, Bengaluru. It wavers between 4G and 3G in some places. Besides, do not expect 4G to be constant while indoors - this is due to the spectrum availability. In India, 4G/LTE-TDD will operate on 2300 MGHz frequency band which by default does not support traversing of airwaves through walls constantly..

Wifi hotspot which assured to connect over 7 to 10 concurrent devices connected only 3 concurrent devices seamlessly on iPhone 5s wifi hotspot.

Just Be Aware

As known 4G technology is basically meant to provide data services. Airtel will offer voice service on 3G network and Reliance Jio has announced to offer voice service on Voice over LTE. For 4G service, we use 2300 frequency band which is different from the world. Device capabilities play a major role in the 2g or 3G or 4G experience.