Reliance Jio Infocomm, India’s newest telecom operator, has a marched 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, 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.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s analytics portal had 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 that 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.

By Premji