Last year in September, Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani launched the new 4G network Reliance Jio, that barely took anytime to become the top rival of every leading telecom company. And that it owes especially to the free data offers like Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan, and the Happy New Year offers. However, in that period, while people flocked to get on board with the “free” network service provider, many complained to be suffering from poor network speeds. In fact, Jio was contested a number of times by its rivals for not being able to provide up to the mark network speeds. However, the latest OpenSignal report now comes in favor of Jio, indicating an increase in speeds.
The report says that Reliance Jio’s speeds “not just increased, they’ve skyrocketed”. OpenSignal shared a graph of Jio’s network speeds, and it can only be seen sloping upwards. From a speed of 4Mbps in the period of December 2016 to February 2017, the speeds can only be seen increasing, with the speeds touching 6 Mbps in the period of May 2017 to July 2017. However, what’s interesting to note in this graph is that as soon as Jio’s free data offers concluded on April 1, 2017, a steady rise in average 4G speeds can be noticed all the way till the end of July. In the last six months, Jio’s typical 4G download has ballooned from 3.9Mbps to 5.8Mbps — that’s almost a 50 percent increase in speed, which is frankly astonishing.
reliance-jio-graph-opensignal
While that’s nothing short of good news for Jio users, the real question this bit of information raises is the cause of this influx. OpenSignal weighs in a few reasons, saying:
It could be that Jio has upgraded its network, adding capacity to feed its customers’ unquenchable thirst for data. It could be that customers started fleeing once the free data promotion ended, though a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey found that most of Jio’s customers weren’t likely to jump ship. Or it could be that the customers are reining in their data use now that they actually have to pay for the megabytes and gigabytes they consume. Chances are, it’s a combination of multiple factors. The bottom line is the typical mobile data experience on Jio’s network has improved dramatically in a relatively short period of time.
 Since its year-long existence, the 4G-only operator has garnered about 130 million subscribers globally, all enticed by its offers of free, nearly unlimited data. But opening up the mobile internet spigot took a toll on Jio’s network. While Jio topped the 4G network availability chart, the network operator ranked last in 4G speed as its millions of customers competed for capacity on its network. But since the freebies have ended, it comes as little surprise, that the speeds have gradually increased.