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Comment by r_singh | Hacker News Reader

Jio does have a positive impact on India for sure. It has increased data consumption in India and made Indians more aware.

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.

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There was no enough competition before jio appeared. Airtel even reduced my measly 135MB packs to 130MB. Now they are removing lifetime incoming calling as well. When you have these kind of operator no wonder people don't care.

Please enquire about the competition in the world's markets before make a judgement about the competitiveness of the Indian telecom industry.

> There was no enough competition before jio appeared.

India was the world's most competitive market for telecom, even before the existence of Jio.

What competition when my measly mb was reduced even further. They even introduced the 28 day month cycle. Low prices does not mean it's competitive.

With the 28 day month cycle and mb / gb data packs, India was still the cheapest for telecom services (and hence had the lowest ARPU).

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.

With 28 days change their made users spend more money instead of 12 months it was 13 months. I am not defending jio you are the one defending airtel abuses. Don't use cheap to side step airtel user hostile policies.

> Now they are removing lifetime incoming calling as well

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.

Exactly, and this is what the broadband and cable industry was hoping for. However, for the moment, Jio's launch remains successful, and the major difference between then and now being data and the new ways to monetise it.

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.

We can also say that Airtel and other telecom were looting Indian customers before Jio came up. Just because Jio is offering competition doesn't mean they are corrupt.

Hahaha, one look at the world's telecom ARPUs should give you a better clue about whether you can say that Airtel was 'looting Indian customers' or not. Also I never said that Jio is corrupt because it's cheaper. Just try to read about the changes in the telco regulation as Jio launched and what industry people have to say and the answer will be clear.

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