It’s been nearly 4 months since Reliance Jio launched their services and offered unlimited voice calling and 4G data free to customers who on boarded their network. Initially, their preview Offer gave unlimited free data, then Jio Welcome Offer reduced the limit to 4GB per day, which was again reduced to 1GB per day with the Happy New Year Offer.
Jio customers faced tremendous problems with voice calling, with just 20 percent calls going through on average – Jio blamed incumbent operators for not allowing PIOs for Jio calls on their network. However, over couple of months it improved and now voice calls from Jio go through more often than not.
In case of 4G data, the speeds were excellent in the first couple of weeks since launch, but, as millions of new users on-boarded, speeds came to crawl in the months of October and November. Looks like Jio has worked on their speed issue as well and reducing the data limit to 1GB per day seems to have worked beautifully.
Jio Speed Increase
According to TRAI’s MySpeed, a crowdsourced speed testing platform, Jio’s average download data speed for December 2016 was registered at a respectable 9.9 Mbps, nearly 80 percent higher than India’s largest operator Airtel, who registered an average speed of 5.8 Mbps. Interestingly, Telenor (5.4 Mbps) beat average speed of Idea Cellular (4.3 Mbps) and Vodafone (4.2 Mbps).
Here is chart that depicts average download speeds of all operators:
The monthly trend especially gives a startling picture of how Jio speeds have increased drastically in month of December 2016. On the other hand, Airtel speeds have seen a consistent drop in the months of November and December. Vodafone is other operator, whose speed have seen consistent but slow rise.
In terms of upload speed too, Jio does well, but not as well as their download speeds. Surprisingly, Telenor performs admirably taking the top spot with 2.8 Mbps followed by Jio at 2.6 Mbps. When it comes to monthly trend, it clearly shows that Jio upload speed has seen excellent rise.
In our view, month of January may witness even better speeds for Jio because now they have further reduced their free 4G data offering to 1GB per day from earlier 4GB. This will ensure that heavy users don’t hog all the bandwidth, and it is more evenly distributed among all users. One thing is quite sure, other operators will need to pull up their socks. Even though Jio is offering free services right now, they are adding close to 20 million subscribers every month and eroding market share from other operators. If others are not able to give better or even on-par services, customers will steadily port their numbers to Jio!