Don't know much, but my Indian friends seem to like them. From what I gather they compete strongly on price (as in free) in an attempt to get into many other sectors. Once you have a wechat-esque hold on numerous market sectors making them profitable isn't really that hard, which seems to be their goal.
I certainly don't agree with this type of business model either, but then again most people I know give strange looks when I rail against FB or Google.
Coming to Jio, their parent company Reliance is the biggest business group of India (the promoter is the 5th richest person in the world). The group is infamous for being corrupt in the business community and the number of questionable instances cannot even be counted. My company has done business with Reliance in the past and has never received payments for the same.
India being a lot more corrupt as a nation gives this company powers that would be unfathomable in developed nations. Just for a few small instances: this company has on many occasions changed regulation just to benefit their business model (or disruption) by sheer political clout. Even in case of Jio, the telecom interconnect charges in India were made 0, and will be changed again when Jio is in a position to benefit from them. And this is just 1 rule change. Vodafone's CEO has openly appealed that India's telecom authorities appear to be working for the interest of Jio only.
This topic is just too big to summarise, it needs a multiple volume book. You're not gonna believe this, but a few authors who have tried to write on the way this group has come up have been banned in India, this probably gives you an idea about how dangerous this group could be. Reliance's books are not believable, debts are irrational, business practices are unethical, etc, etc and the list will go on.
A clue here Reliance is a big backer of election campaigns for the current regime.
However, Gopal, just look at data prices world wide. India was already the cheapest in the world for telecom, and now the prices are unsustainable. Indians don't care about privacy, but this kind of pricing would require monetisation from a lot more sources than just user data. Not to mention the drop in QOS from all telcos after Jio moved pricing below cost.
I'm happy you're happy. But this isn't rational, and you don't know what kind of corrupt practices have made this possible.
> There was no enough competition before jio appeared.
India was the world's most competitive market for telecom, even before the existence of Jio.
I know that you want to defend Jio because you love the fact that you save few hundred rupees on your phone bill. But you probably don't know that if Reliance did not change regulation to make interconnect charges Rs.0 and benefit them, this would have not been possible. And I'm sure, now that they have the highest number of connections, they're going to make India introduce interconnect charges again.
Don't you wonder why this happened even after the launch of cheap Reliance Communication INR 501 phones back in 2002/03? They also gave people cheap plans and phones so, we should have been in better place. Then why is it that years later people have to struggle even for free lifetime incoming calls?
The reason is simple - Other telecos had to reduce prices to fight against customer migration to RCom. And then years later they were eating losses left and right thanks to RCom. They had to remove incentives to get back into profitability. Meanwhile, Reliance Communication is nearly bankrupt.
I do not hope for Jio's demise (not that it matters), but certainly hope that regulation is at least fair to all players and doesn't conveniently pave the path for its dominance over Indian industries like many people aware of the matter (spokespersons from telco infra providers like Ciena, RAD, CISCO, HUAWEI, etc.) have been saying.