India's Reliance Jio snags 72.4 million 4G LTE subscribers in just 4 months
The telecom operator owned by India’s richest man continues to win over half-a-million subscribers each day.
The 4G LTE-only Reliance Jio from India’s largest industrial house Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has revealed it has over 72.4 million subscribers on its network.
The feat comes just four months after the service was launched to the public. The company said it is seeing over 600,000 subscribers join its network every day, at a pace that it claims surpasses the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype.
Though the milestone falls short of company’s own expectations (RIL’s Mukesh Ambani had hoped to see 100 million subscribers by the end of 2016), Reliance Jio’s ability to get 72 million subscribers will worry incumbent players.
India's oldest private carrier, Airtel, has 260 million subscribers, for instance. Vodafone, which is the second largest carrier, has over 200 million subscribers. State-run BSNL has around 90 million mobile subscribers.
It’s not difficult to assess why Reliance Jio has become so popular in the country. At a price sensitive market such as that of India where many hesitate to browse much on the internet, Reliance has been offering a all its services, including 1GB of 4G LTE data every day, for free4G LTE data to its subscribers at no charge.
The company announced Reliance Jio Welcome Offer at the time of the launch in September last year, offering subscribers 4GB of data each day. Last month, it announced a new plan to extend the free data — albeit 1GB now — till the end of March 2017.
Analysts at Credit Suisse said last year Reliance Jio was handling more than 16,000 TB data each day, the largest by any carrier in the world.
On top of that, Reliance Jio is also offering these subscribers something to browse. It is offering nearly a dozen of apps, offering services such as access to live TV channels, movies and music streaming to subscribers at no cost. Subscribers will be able to enjoy these bouquet of services for free till the end of this year.
However, things are not as rosy as they seem. Jio has been forced to offer everything for free as its users are unable to make calls to other networks. The company announced that 17.5% of calls made by its users to those on rival Airtel's network failed to connect. Jio alleges incumbent players of blocking its calls by giving lesser number of points of interconnect. Its rivals blame it on Jio's network and the heavy traffic owing to all voice calls being free.
