Jio’s 4G Revolution: New Age Internet Technology of India

Sometimes a revolution is a good thing as it gives rise to newer and better forms of technologies. Take the industrial revolution as an example which made regular work easier and quicker with the number of machines invented for the purpose. One such revolution occurring in India today is the digital revolution caused by the 4G technology of Reliance Jio.

Different Internet technologies in India

In 1992, India saw the entry of the popular 2G service. This had a speed of 64 kbps. Today, many service providers in the country are still offering this service. The primary services offered by this form of technology include GPRS data, digital phone calls, and text messaging.

3G services began in the latter half of 2008. The first provider of this service was MTNL. It was later that other telecom operators began services over this network. 3G offered primary services like a faster Internet connection of 384 to 2,000 kbps, phone calls, and multimedia messaging. Of course, 3G didn’t get as much of the telecom limelight as it deserved. This is because, by the time most telecom operators began to offer it on a large scale, it was already 2011.

A mere five years later, we were introduced to 4G in the later half of 2016. It started with Reliance Jio which commercially launched 4G VoLTE services across India. 4G offers services like blazing-fast Internet speeds, Internet protocol for voice, phone calls, and multimedia messaging. The average 4G speed in India is 5.1 Mbps.

Reliance Jio’s break-in into the telecom market

As given above, Reliance Jio was the first to offer 4G services when it launched with its ‘Welcome Offer.’ This offer gave users high-speed data services, HD video and voice calling, and unlimited SMS for free for a period of almost four months. This was followed by other offers like Jio Prime, Happy New Year offer, Jio Summer Surprise, and more. All these offers gave users free or extremely cheap plans.

These offers led to a tariff war between Jio and other major telecom operators with the latter cutting down tariffs heavily to meet competition. Many operators also upgraded to the 4G network while offering services for their existing 2G and 3G networks.

How Jio affected the country’s data consumption

Over the past one year, Jio has earned a number of achievements not only at the national level but also at the international level.

Some examples of these are below:

• According to OpenSignal, Jio’s offers attracted over a 100 million subscribers, which helped India shoot up to the top 20 countries in terms of 4G availability at a rating of 81.6 percent.
• The 4G service on Jio was available almost 91.6 percent of the time, which is an exceptional standard globally.
• In the Jio Preview offer alone, an average of around 26GB data per user was used in a month
• Indians have started consuming about 1.3 billion GB data in a month (as of March 2017), from the 200 million GB (in June 2016)

Even though 4G has had such a ground-breaking impact on the telecom industry, it has also started to pave the way for 5G. It remains to see how Jio and the telecom industry, in general, handle this soon-to-arrive breakthrough.