Reliance Jio’s per day data traffic higher than other telcos: Credit Suisse

KOLKATA: Reliance Jio Infocomm, India’s newest telecom operator, has stolen a march over China Mobile and the UK’s Vodafone by becoming the largest network globally in terms of data traffic carried in a little over a month of commercial launch, Credit Suisse said.

Jio’s network carries 16,000 terabytes of data traffic a day, it said, exceeding the levels of China Mobile (12,000-plus TBs/day), Vodafone Global (6,000 TBs/day), China Unicom (4,000 TBs/day) and Bharti Airtel (2,000 TBs/day). Jio’s data traffic of 16,000 TBs a day is based on the company’s 16 million customers consuming 1GB of data daily.

A day earlier, India’s telecom regulator said the network of the Mukesh Ambani-owned company was the slowest in the country, lagging behind speeds offered by the top four carriers – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications.


According to Credit Suisse, Jio’s promotional free services offer makes its data traffic 4.2 times larger than the combined volumes of the Big three of Indian telecom, based on June figures. Under the circumstances, the Swiss brokerage said, the reported slowing speeds of Jio’s 4G network “is understandable” as the newest telecom operator is “getting stress-tested.”

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s analytics portal had on Thursday pegged the speeds of Jio’s 4G network at 6.2 Mbps (megabits per second), which was below speeds clocked on the Airtel (11.4 Mbps), RCom (7.9 Mbps), Idea (7.6 Mbps) and Vodafone India (7.3 Mbps) networks.

Jio said the regulator’s comparison had “an inherent bias against Jio’s data usage,” especially since its offer structure and customer behaviour pattern were different.

“There is a daily fair usage policy (FUP) limit of 4 GB data consumption per user” under its Welcome Offer, Jio said. Such a limit, it said, had been set to prevent heavy data users from degrading the experience of others.

Jio customers “enjoy unmatched 4G LTE speeds before the FUP limit is reached” but thereafter, they get throttled to 256 kbps.

Full 4G LTE speeds are restored only after the next 24-hour cycle starts, a company spokesman said in a statement on Friday.

According to Jio, a higher proportion of its users “run up against the FUP limit” since the company’s Welcome Offer is free.

By comparison, “not all non-Jio users have FUP based plans – rather, their usage is completely stopped and they are entirely prevented from performing speed tests,” the Jio spokesman added.

The company said non-Jio users with FUP-based plans face such situations (speeds getting throttled) once a month and such customers invariably recharge quickly and restore full speeds.

Accordingly, the difference in Jio’s offer structures and associated customer behaviours result in a large proportion of the speed tests being conducted on its 4G network when speeds are throttled “via FUP to 256 kbps.”