Even though the newly formed Vodafone-Idea alliance has resulted in India’s largest telecom entity with a combined subscriber base of over 40.8 crore people, Reliance Jio is steadily gaining traction in the market with its five-pronged strategy to take over India’s mobile internet, feature phone, home broadband, calling, and content market. The telco now reports that it has amassed 215 million plus subscribers in the country and recorded 642 crore GB of data consumption in the second quarter of this year.
Reliance Jio reports that it recorded an average data consumption of 10.6GB per user per month in Q2 2018, carrying 76 percent of the total 4G traffic in India. Jio users made 744 minutes worth of calls per month per subscriber, totalling to 44,871 crore minutes of VoLTE traffic in the quarter. The company also notes that its users consume more than 340 crore hours of video content per month, amounting to 15.4 hours of video consumption per user per month.
Another statistic that Jio shared in its media release is that it has the lowest call drop rate in the industry – 0.13%. Although there is no way to verify this claim as there is no data available for the same, it’s possible that Jio’s infrastructure investments and the fact that 4G VoLTE services now come within the ambit of quality of service (QoS) rules for telcos helped the company reduce its rampant call drop problem. October onwards, all telecom companies in India will need to disclose details of call drops on VoLTE networks in their respective monthly compliance reports. This will make the information more transparent and possibly give us a better sense of the call drop issue on Jio’s network.
For now, Jio is focussed on getting its GigaFiber broadband services up and running in 1100 cities across India. The company has already opened registrations for JioGigaFiber and has reportedly completed deployment of the fiber broadband service in 900 cities.