India has the highest data usage per smartphone
thehindu.com
thehindu.com
Which providers?
>1.5GB data per data.
Guess you mean per day.
Right, have tried this one.
Till a certain extent. Netflix, Prime Videos, Hotstar etc have much more variety and higher quality and some are VERY AFFORDABLE. Prime videos and Hotstar (HBO, Game of thrones, Veep, Silicon Valley like shows) can be had for $14 USD per year EACH. So upwardly mobile Indians can subscribe to multiple OTT streaming services (I do Netflix, Hostart, Primve Video + Apple Music). For the price of one Spotify sub in US, you can subscribe to 5-7 music streaming services in India.
For the rest, Indian creators on YouTube have pretty much surpassed every big name streaming company. TVF, Timeliners etc have created content which resonates with 18-35 year olds on an emotional level. Netflix et al. will never have that emotional connect so easily.
I think T-Series would like a word.
In all seriousness I think the proliferation of independent content creators is incredible. Maybe content is of lower quality, but it's more fun.
TVF created a series set in 90s India which resonated with the current late 20s crowd so well that it spread like wildfire. If tomorrow, TVF would launch a movie, it will pretty much fill all the theaters in the country.
I would trust Wirecutter reviews more than my favorite YouTubers’ reviews, for example. The livelihoods of the reviewers is not dependent nearly as much on how well they are paid by their sponsor.
What is the cost for the service you mentioned in India in US dollars?
One e.g. - 1.5Gb/day, 84 days, Rs 399. 1 USD =~ 70 INR, so that comes to around $6 for 3 months.
And this includes unlimited calling, and everyone uses WhatsApp for messaging.
Also, India would have better date quality if market was open to foreign players without requiring Indian stakes.
India has very high density in many areas where these kind of data rates are possible and we all would be on 1gbps connections
I think people on this thread are overstating the data quality problems. I don't live in India anymore but I still retain a Vodafone SIM card that I use when I travel back. On their 4G plan, I easily get 15Mbps, which is enough to stream full HD videos if you wanted to. 4K on the phone is not a requirement for most people as I don't know of any phones with full 4K displays in the market.
The market is actually doing very well, especially compared to North America (where I currently live).
That looks like an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen. Or is Jio going to keep at it forever?
I mean, in the US, Tesla is giving away promotional battery capacity for free, which they're taking away after a few months. That sounds more egregious than anything else.
And many cable providers give discounted rates for the first few months, after which the rate goes up.
Reliance just like any other telecom operator was laying cables which they could even lease to other private players.
But what exactly gave them enough confidence to go ahead with Jio, a deep discounted mobile network.
Jio's network infrastructure is far advanced when compared to other operations. They didn't just build it by keeping 4G in mind. It can support 5G and follow up generations without a lot of modifications. Incumbent operators had to upgrade their 2G/3G infra to support 4G. In fact, lack of 2G/3G service is a reason why Jio doesn't operate in Andaman & Nicobar islands where it's mandatory for operators to support 2G/3G service.
> But what exactly gave them enough confidence to go ahead with Jio, a deep discounted mobile network.
I would say it was access to funding and top-level infra. Not to forget, the industry was stagnant when it comes to high prices.
I included the fibre optic network because most of the other operators don't have a high capacity network like that across the country. Owning your own infrastructure allows you to undercut your opponents because you don't really have to ameliorate them to get access to their infrastructure.
Not sure what kind of conspiracy you're thinking of. Jio is actually funded through Debt financing. Many Indian and non-Indian banks have given huge loans to Jio[1][2].
1.https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/rel...
2. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/financ...
You’re talking about access. People don’t buy a TV to get access to content, they buy one to watch the content, whether that’s via cable, OTA, streaming services, pirating, etc. Are you saying that people in India are just fine with consuming all of their TV and movies on a tiny phone screen?
I know some people who don’t have a TV, but they would rather just not watch TV/movies at all than stream it to their phone (other than maybe during a long commute or while on the plane).
- "watching TV" to more and more people is youtube and other online video
- a lot of people in the US don't watch video on their phone because they would blow their data plan in short order. Even unlimited plans throttle in various ways when you go over a certain amount.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wifi_vs_cellular.png
Unless I am at home, I never go through the hassle of WiFi. I have unlimited data on both my phone and cellular equipped iPad.
Thats mostly because of population density and sunk labor costs for building the infrastructure. Many parts of US are so sparsely populated that the densely populated regions have to subsidize some of the costs of buildding the infrastrcuture in those regions.
Canada is the worst when it comes to mobile services because they don't have cities like New York to subsidize the sparse regions. I mean the most dense metro area - Greater Toronto area has a population nf 4 million or so.
Any densely populated nation has very affordable mobile services. In my experience - UK, France, Singapore and SE Asia all have affordable mobile services.
Of course, no one can match Jio when it comes to price:feature parity. They have done what no other telecom provider in the world could do. It was and still remains one of the biggest bets in the telecom world and it wouldn't have been possible in any other country, except may be China.
Australia has a lower density and much much better plans.
SK, 6th in population density within Canada has the best rates because they have a crown-owned telecom provider SaskTel
Majority of this utilization would be on Streaming, Torrent downloads etc etc, Also to note that , many of the calls made in India are VOLTE calls..
[1] https://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio/from-bi...
One advantage is that Jio was totally new to the market so they started with 4G networks directly. The connectivity, voice clarity and bandwidth was very good due to only-4G network. Other operators were are still working on 2G, 3G and 4G.
I had earlier worked for Jio for 5 years and I feel proud today that I contributed for the country - in allowing the easy access of data to public. I remember, before 6 years I used to get 1 GB data for Rs. 250. Today for the same amount I can nearly get 50 GB data.
My wife also worked for Jio and today is her last day. I feel very sad now.
In my experience, a lot of people I know switched streaming services instead of torrents. Amazon prime and Hoststar are quite affordable and have decent content now a days and people generally don't bother with the torrents as much as they did a few years ago.
Also, the quality of video and the user experience on Netflix is leagues ahead of Prime and Hotstar (in that order). Hotstar is very poor on technology and design. It only has its content catalog to lean on.
We've had major sites blocked in the UK for years but no one can keep up with proxybay.app and its endless rehosts.
but there are things like free online leechers, telegram groups that freely share pirated content..
It is not possible to get old movies this way tho...
[0] This has interestingly resulted in folks using Helo, Telegram et al to share pirated content and porn.
The way Jio was built and what challenges they faced trying to build a gigantic mobile operator from scratch and building it secure from day one are a story i'd like to read a book about, but I'm already glad he held a talk about it.
The most interesting part was their realization that there was nearly no "new & secure" hardware available they could buy off the shelf, most came with old unpatched versions of software, many had components that simply had no update functionality at all, some had but required manual onsite intervention for updates, just what you need when you want to connect one of the largest countries on this planet. This was not third-rate stuff from China, he was talking Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei... the name brands involved in this space.
Fascinating and astounding what went on at this time at Jio and i'm grateful that sometimes people that deeply care about these issues get into these positions and get to fight these demons.
How do you make money offering free deals?
all you need is a large chunk of money, or absurdly low-cost loans, or some govt "assistance", or a mix of these, to last until that "start making profits" line.
They also are known for their ways with price competition. Even worse if you are an OEM, delayed payments are the norm.
Some years ago I worked on a Unix/C/Oracle software project for VSNL, a public sector or quasi-government entity that was India's telecom carrier to/from abroad (V for the word Videsh, which means foreign country in Hindi). Worked onsite in their office in Mumbai, near the (Arabian) Sea coast, where international telecom cables probably come in. There was a huge telecom switch installed there. It was like the size of several really high refrigerators pushed together. First time I had seen one. Some Oriental-looking engineers were working on it (could have been from some Japanese company like Fujitsu or whatever, which might have been into that line of products - switches). I asked our VSNL contact there what the thing was, and he said it was the main telecom switch for connectivity between the outside world and India, and cost about INR 200 crore (IIRC).
INR 200 crore in USD (today's rates):
https://www.google.com/search?q=INR+200+crore+in+USD
Works out to about USD 28 million for that switch.
These plans are provided by the other major service providers.
Postpaid plans (contract plans) in India are ripoffs, comparatively.
The biggest telcos in India havent even started content plays. Netflix just entered India.
And we still have HALF A BILLION people not on the internet. This is in an environment with constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to privacy (that cannot be reversed by the govt), a govt run mobile payments infrastructure that is literally a free Stripe+Paypal+Venmo+Alipay and perhaps the world's largest pool of software developers.
There are multiple large/successful venture funded startups in India started and run by non-citizen expatriates (incl women). English is pretty much the language of business and India-US/India-EU have excellent non-double taxation laws.
Healthcare is dirt cheap and very good.
Its a brilliant time to do a startup here.
Checkout https://www.justwatch.com/in to see the content providers in India. Last time I checked we had less streaming services than Germany!
UPI or Unified Payments Interface. I cannot stress how innovative this payment mode is.
* No risk of fraud (can't approve a transaction without a PIN on your mobile) - fraud as in card cloning, malware infected websites running off with card details. Does not preclude social engineering where users fall into clever tricks.
* no privacy issues yet (money is directly debited from account without a mastercard/visa involved)
* anyone can make a UPI app (all banks have their own, Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe etc)
* no cards to duplicate
* you can manage multiple VPAs on one account, so I can create different identities for different purposes all debiting money from one account.
Exceptions - UPI still doesn't support recurring payments or subscriptions and some other cases.
But as a regular consumer, I find plastic outdated. I've never used WeChat/AliPay so can't comment on that but the only time I have to use a credit card is when I have to pay international companies (DO, GSuite etc) in USD/EUR.
EDIT - expanded on kinds of fraud.
Isn’t Aadhar (fingerprints + iris scan) needed to have a bank account? If yes, then it’s a bit disingenuous to say there are no privacy issues.
> No risk of fraud
A cursory search will show plenty of press articles re UPI fraud. For instance [1].
[1] https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/personal-finance/...
[1] https://qz.com/india/1351263/supreme-court-verdict-how-india...
This is just one source but there's lot of others reporting the same thing. Do you have a citation that says otherwise?
If you can afford the penalty for late filing of tax returns, go for that. There are still several review petitions against last year’s verdict on Aadhaar. The Supreme Court, as usual, is delaying hearing those. Check out no2uid on Twitter, rethinkaadhaar.in and others.
Nopes. Govt tried really hard. Attorney General didn't really sound far from Facebook's primary lawyer. But Supreme Court shut it down.
>A cursory search will show plenty of press articles re UPI fraud. For instance [1].
I should expand that I meant technical fraud - your card being cloned on a PoS, or a malware infected website siphoning card details, lax controls by card issuers etc (Amex is notorious for approving payments with just the card number and CVV)
Stuff like this is hard on UPI BUT it is isn't idiot proof. You can't really make a system secure when the human victim willingly hands over information as was alluded by your link.
So unless you're too poor to file taxes (or are not an Indian resident), bank accounts can always be linked to Aadhar, even if it happens via the PAN.
[1] https://qz.com/india/1351263/supreme-court-verdict-how-india...
[2] https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/jmxPkXXGWeEfiAsCsA1xnO/Opin...
Re Aadhar -- HN readers should note that IndiaStack (indiastack.org, very popular with VCs operating in India) relies a lot on Aadhar, so a lot of people in Indian Startups have a financial interest in not seeing the downsides of Aadhar.
Aadhar being necessary for tax filing !== Aadhar is mandatory for operating a bank account, claims which you made in previous posts.
Yes, going backwards government can indeed find your bank accounts because you might quote them on tax forms but having Aadhar is NOT necessary for operating a bank account. I have multiple accounts, none of which have been closed or service being denied for lack of an aadhar number.
>Re Aadhar -- HN readers should note that IndiaStack (indiastack.org, very popular with VCs operating in India) relies a lot on Aadhar, so a lot of people in Indian Startups have a financial interest in not seeing the downsides of Aadhar.
This is exaggerated. People can lead perfectly functional lives without quoting Aadhar to anybody except the taxman. You're pushing it.
Also, given that a lot of Aadhar data has leaked (even the biometrics have leaked in some states[2]) and given the lack of privacy legislation in India, it’s trivial for private entities, including scammers, to know your bank accounts.
Wide availability of bank account info has enabled a number of social engineering attacks[1].
Separately UPI remains vulnerable to SIM cloning as the phone number is crucial to UPI identity.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&q=upi+fraud+in+india
[2] https://medium.com/karana/gujarat-biometric-leak-and-registe...
See this recent opinion piece. [1]
Considering nearly everyone (who isn't an ARPU "deadbeat") is on WhatsApp I would think the ruling doesn't matter one way or another because you don't have much privacy left anyway.
Plus, if the govt wants the scoop on anyone's private life, they will just ask Facebook to hand it over or else.... (ban WhatsApp, ban Instagram, block approval for cryptocurrency projects, harden data storage rules and whatever else a government can do to threaten a corporation).
in india, the right to privacy was upheld by the constitutional bench of the supreme court to be a fundamental human right.
This triggered a multi-billion dollar reversal of the Aadhaar biometric social-security id project.
the govt cannot do this without due judicial process even if it tries to create a law. we have stronger privacy protections than the US.
> Healthcare is dirt cheap and very good.
That's news to me because afaik it is damn expensive for the income level in India.
There is no data privacy law in India as yet. The one drafted last year has many issues. Saying that the government cannot reverse it is naive. The government can make laws that side with corporates and itself, without providing adequate protections for citizens.
The Aadhaar linkage and re-enablement for use by private companies in contravention to the Supreme Court verdict is another sign that the government can, and will, do what it wants. The Supreme Court is unfortunately not proactive in issues that have the potential to affect all the people in the country.
Data-plans on offer: https://www.jio.com/en-in/4g-plans
And they manage to remain profitable (only-telco in India that reported profit this quarter) : https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/relian...
In Poland I pay ~ 13.30 USD for 12 GB per month (with additional 12 GB on top of that for 1 year) + unlimited calls/sms/mms. And my plan is pretty crappy in comparison to currently available ones.
Investing in them is a play on interest rates more than anything.
Lots of télécoms came out like bandits by selling their infrastructure at very high valuations.
Looking at the lastest financials report: https://s22.q4cdn.com/758587962/files/doc_financials/quarter...
They are reporting a leverage ratio of ~7. My initial hot-take: That's a leverage multiple; not a ratio. Yet reading their formula they are reporting that 7 as DEBT / PRE-DEPRECATION-PROFIT. Thus such a formula is not an LTV but rather a formula one might use if one acknowledged the underlying assets only had cashflow value.
Using an LTV formula they look more reasonable at 0.7LTV. Which indeed is high, about half the equity common to the REITs I've looked at. Yet with a 10% return on invested capital it does not seem the infrastructure was overvalued.
Now this is not an area I know much about so I'm mostly hoping you can show me where I'm wrong and thus I can learn more.
Many high debt companies that had their equity almost wiped out ended up with 10x the equity if they could pay their bills again.
That's per year, not month!
Third party (or wholy owned subsidiaries) MVNOs are often less expensive as well.
EDIT: English sentence structure
At peak hours I see 1+ Mbps, 8+ Mbps during least(10pm - 8am) traffic hours.
I use DNSFilter along with DoT & DoH for Smartphone. Stubby for my Laptop's Ubuntu over USB hotspot.
Yes, JIO changed data market with its bullish 4G investment. Prior to that, subscribers could ride free on with zero/month for only incoming calls. Now every subscriber has to pay $2-4/annum for the same ride.
After this mandatory fee, I suspect #subscribers in overall fell. Edit: Indeed latest stats see a dip in Mar-2019. Last year it saw double digit growth in subscriptions. https://main.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/PR_No.40of2019....
I remember browsing at ~10 KiB/s on BSNL 2G network at 20MB/day for INR 4, now at nearly same cost, I can get much better internet, though not even near to foreign speeds.
Hasan Minhaj did a show this week on Netflix, you should watch it - he explains pretty well how horrible Comcast like companies are.
[0] https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/relian...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_industry_in_Russi...
What does Comcast have to do with the price of cellular data?
Even Europe is way, way cheaper than America. Why is it so expensive here? Anyone know? Is it just that a few companies run the market and can charge what they want? Or are there less nefarious reasons?
The thing they all have in common is high barriers to entry and very few competitors. So basically lack of competition.
You can go through the comments of Youtube for more clarification.
Why? They're cheap because the average income in India is 1000 dollars a year. And there is probably little to no regulation when it comes to setting up infrastructure.
Edit: Also, the entire network is ipv6 enabled from the beginning. India went from white to green within months on ipv6 graph at
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
Although I’d imagine such a large addition should also be reflected in Google’s aggregate statistics, I don’t know how often they update the weightings for each country though.
Or to put it another way, would you stream 4K video with it?
In the UK you can buy a 200mbps connection, but at peak times in the evening it slows to about 10mbps since they don’t have the capacity.
I suppose they point is peak time usage.
Additionally, it's often ~5x slower than in 2nd world countries...
Romania has some of the best Internet in the world; as far as I recall, you can get 1Gbps for like 10-15 dollars in most non-rural areas. I think that's partly because of the huge amount of competition that was present in the early 00s, when we had a ridiculous amount of ISPs per city, and partly because all the cables are suspended on top of lampposts, as opposed to buried under the sidewalks and streets. That's way cheaper than digging half the city for new, higher-speed Internet.
Similar thing in Poland (although our network is in worse condition than in Romania, but we still can have 1 Gbps for about 18 USD, even in some rural areas like mine :).
I think this is quite similar to the banking sector, we have most of the banks internet ready, some of them are are mostly internet, with very few brick and mortar places. When my colleague went to Switzerland he was shocked how the banks there force one to visit them personally to do even basic stuff (at least in the beginning - in Poland I can create banking account without leaving my home, I just need to wait for package to sign in front of a courier) - and have crappy websites.
This is also a leftover of the early internet migration, now they don't have enough incentive to do it better.
Back in Lithuania cable was installed everywhere in early 90s, but cable internet didn’t catch on.
P.S. saw an ad here the other day - €3/week for 1TB of LTE data.
Like Canada, Australia is also a very large, sparsely populated country but mobile data is fast and reasonably priced (e.g., https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/, which I use).
Time for me to email my MP tonight.
https://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/sim-only-plans
I’d be all over that but it says the plan is only available for new services and I’m rather fond of my mobile number.
Even if you do this, comparisons are hard. Completely different economies, market structures and target groups, subsidies, taxation, regulation, etc can all have a big effect.
Looking at India, it has a GDP per Capita that's 1/8 of the US, and an average monthly income of 150$!
That should give you a measure for how 10$ in India are very different from 10$ in the US.
Okay, then lets multiply Indian prices by 8.
Someone up the thread quoted this:
>For 6 dollars 50 cents, you get 1.5 GB/day for 91 days.
Where in the US can I get 1.5GB/day for 91 days for $52 ?
Before someone talks about congestion, this is India, with 1.3 Billion people and "third world" infrastructure. If that kind of bandwidth can be provided to that many folks where people are routinely using it to watch TV channels (see Jio TV), why can't we do it here? I think congestion and data caps are just excuses to wring more money.
Strictly multiplying by 8 isn't really a good comparison, as the cost of supporting such a network in India isn't going to cost 1/8th as much as the US. I'm sure there's a lot of room for the US cellular carriers to be more efficient.
In reality though, I think many US users here probably get the majority of their bandwidth over WiFi and do not really use that much LTE data. But, if I wanted to replace my $70/month cable Internet with just a Mint subscription, i.e. the $25/month plus 2x $20 refills, that would buy 18 GB/month of LTE.
I do, however, have truly unlimited, which means I can tether without hesitation. T-Mobile does have unlimited plans at $35/line a month for 55 or older, but that is still twice the $18/month price.
As the sibling post states, there are competitive plans like Mint, or FreedomPop, which offer extremely cheap plans, but nowhere near 1.5GiB of data a day. So I guess we are much further away than I thought we were.
And service isn't that stellar. They say 4G but 400 KiB/s is average IMO. I am from rural india & used net before that on lowend J2ME phones, which was around 10 KiB/s.
Having said that, jio has done a great job, where otherwise 1GiB of 2G data cost >$5.
Break apart the fixed line business from the wireless business and you’ll see one crush the other.
This means that India is actually much lower in total bandwidth usage per month per person than North America and Europe overall.
I live in Arkansas, and my AT&T bill this month is $410. Granted, about $150 of that are payment plans for devices, but still. The base rate plan is $110, and there's a $20-30 per line fee for four separate lines.
I have an iPad Pro 11" LTE and an iPhone X, my wife has an S10+, and I handed down my 6th Gen iPad LTE to my 10-year-old. It's a lot more than "needed", and our aggregate data usage is 30+ GB/month, but still. The difference in cost is staggering.
The $130 extra for an iPad with cellular and $20 extra per month for unlimited data on the iPad is well worth the convenience of having two cellular devices.
I pay roughly $210 a month for five phones and two iPads all with unlimited data.
T-mobile also has free data roaming in most other countries where we go on vacation.
Finally, I very often tether my MBP to my iPad, because the iPad's battery lasts much longer. If my phone battery is low I pretty much need to charge it so I can get calls from family. If my iPad's battery dies I'm merely inconvenienced for a while.
Bit lower than your $410, but it sounds like you have multiple plans, always buying very high-end new hardware. There's a point where you have to accept that this is an expensive hobby or luxury item. You chose to get all these devices.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not really complaining about the price I'm paying for the devices themselves; I included that specifically so it wouldn't be taken as if the entire bill was due to the data I consume.
> always buying very high-end new hardware
That's a pretty recent thing for me. The first new flagship phone I ever bought was an S7 Edge. I liked it enough that it made sense for me to upgrade to the iPhone X when it died. The 6th Gen iPad was an impulse purchase, but one that turned out to be a much more practical thing than I expected. Then I upgraded and passed it down to my daughter - she's homeschooled, and can access her online lessons from wherever we happen to be on it, which is very handy.
Jio forced everyone to bring down the prices. Now all those companies have begun posting quarterly losses and they don't have a humungous cash cow like jio. This is not gonna end well.
That’s how it works in the west. At least it’s how we got great non-last-mile connectivity.
This is a serious question.
What is Jio's cash cow?
In dense cities, I imagine towers can theoretically serve more people. Obviously you reach a saturation point where a tower can only serve so many people and has to be expanded but I suspect this lowers infrastructure costs. One would have to be able to handle larger "burst" demands in a densely populated area though.
On top of that, I'm not familiar with topography of India, but certain areas in the US are mountainous and as a result, require even more towers to provide coverage (for typically sparse populations). In dense cities where you have near line of sight, I imagine that increases range reducing infrastructure demands some (though this constraint may be moot based on typical tower saturation).
In India I would expect cheaper prices based on that line of reason, though I may be missing something critical (I'm no telecom expert).
I suspect that while more bodies definitely helps defray costs, the marginal costs of expanding infrastructure once you reach breaking point are by no means cheap.
We were deprived for the longest, being offered a gigabyte for a month for $5 - $10, and now we have practically free mobile connectivity with data.
a gigabyte per day per month at the very least. some plans (see other comments) offer 1.5GB per day for 91 days at the same overall cost of $5-$10.
Very few subscribe. Youtube would be the majority in my opinion. Hotstar too, but only during cricket matches.
Local content on Youtube is on the rise.
Example:
Technical Guruji (A Hindi tech channel) has way more subscribers than MKBHD - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOhHO2ICt0ti9KAh-QHvttQ
A Punjabi song is nearing a billion views : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkJO_GrCo0
It is a largely untapped market and ripe for takeover.
From looking over it, he has more subscribers but way less views per video.
MKBHD is easily over 2M views per video where Guruji never really breaches 1M views and seems to be around 400K per video.
MKBHD - 39 Million[0]
Technical Guruji - 41.5 Million[1]
[0] - https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/marquesbrownlee
[1] - https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCOhHO2ICt0ti9KAh-QH...
not to forget how Jio scammed their way into existence:
[1] https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/spectrum-grab/art...
[2] https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/the-great-telecom...
and, this artificially low cost data is killing competition, which will impact a lot of their debt held by banks. and to keep these banks alive, govt shall resort to some more "recapitalization".
effectively, Jio's low cost data is being funded by taxpayer money.
we all need to keep that in mind.
To put it this way: I had more reliable coverage and lots more bandwidth available just outside Mogadishu than I've ever had in San Francisco.
I am not joking.
Paris isn’t particularly high density, and practically everything is historical, but you don’t see big ugly base stations everywhere to provide excellent coverage.
And their telecom (wired and wireless) rates are dirt cheap.
I dunno about that, I've had fantastic connectivity in Singapore, Hong Kong, etc
[] Movie piracy: continuing through telegram groups
[] WhatsApp - people share videos on whatsapp a lot these days..
[] YouTube - Here I don't think ppl are much into paying for Netflix / Amazon, but YouTube is used a lot.
[] Others: services like hotstar, voot ( movie / TV live streaming ), audio streaming services. Most of these are ad supported. And of course, seems quite a lot at adult content..
This is what I observed in surroundings. Indian people don't care much about ads and that also has been a monetization strategy for jio. I personally don't use any of their apps but many do. Also their cheap feature phones embed advertising.
But to your point, I also watch videos primarily on my laptop, not my phone. I also have a phone with plenty of storage so I can cache all my most listened to music, my audiobook, and latest podcasts.
I technically have unlimited data, albeit dropping down to 2G speeds after 2GB, but I almost ever hit that limit. The cost isn't a factor for me, since it's flat-rate. I know it is to some people, but it's the presence of wifi and my preference for watching videos on my laptop that keeps mobile data usage low.
This was in Delhi and they said the providers could be very flakey. A back up was necessary. Some people also used their phone and it’s hotspot as the main source of internet.
Are having multiple SIMs common in India? Or was I just working with Software Engineers?
Source: Indonesian with family that needs two-sim cards phones.
Back in the day when India did not have number portability, one sim used to be the primary number and the other sim was mostly used for data which could be frequently changed based on the data plans available.
Unlike some other countries, India's mobile rates are very competitive (cheapest in the world, in fact) so there's little reason to shop around, so cost isn't a driver for multiple SIMs.
I was told of two primary reasons: One, India's telco regulator has "circles" which are basically zones in the country (some circles are essentially a state, but some of the smaller states may combine to form a circle). In-circle calling is at local rates. Out-of-circle calls had STD (long distance) rates applied. So you might have a 2nd SIM if you travel out of circle frequently.
Reliace Jio and Airtel ("the big two") have national licenses now, and I believe their users don't pay long-distance charges at all. So this driver to have two SIMs is disappearing.
The 2nd reason was -- different networks had coverage blackspots in different areas, and having two SIMs was an avoidance measure. Jio and Airtel, while not perfect, have fairly good 4G infrastructure and blackspots have significantly reduced.
Irrespective of the reason, the economic rationale for multiple SIMs was that a "pay as you go" SIM was very cheap to keep active. You paid a dollar or so and it was active for a long time -- 6 months or so (Jio never did this). With margins squeezed by Jio, other operators are feeling less charitable and want regular monthly payments or conversion to a plan to keep the SIM alive. The minimum payments are still ridiculously small especially in dollar terms, but they will pinch the less well off (given India's nominal average monthly income is about $140, there are a lot of people in this category). I suspect eventually most people won't bother if they're happy with their service.
There are other reasons (a lack of trust in the number portability process, India's lack of privacy legislation which means your number is up for grabs for spam calls and texts ignoring the regulator's Do Not Disturb guidelines) but until recently it was almost cost-free to have multiple SIMs. That'll change soon, I suspect.
For anyone reading this from India: is there any negative sentiment about Jio or is everyone just really excited to have cheap reliable data access?
I currently have a 100Mbps + 200 GB per month plan but looking at the tariffs of Jio GigaFiber I can get 100Mbps + 100GB per month + complimentary 40GB per month for a fraction of the price. Once Jio GigaFiber launches with proper tariff plans I am sure I can opt for the 1Gbps + 1TB per month plan for the same price I am paying my current FTTH provider.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/jio-giga...
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/jio-giga...
Even broadband here has reached next level. I pay $30/mo for 200 Mbps speeds and 1 TB data transfer. It's hilariously cheap. This is thanks to ACT Fibernet.
I think UPI is up there in the list. At present I make 80% of my digital transactions (and close to ~100% transactions below $10) via UPI. I can't believe something this cool came out of a body of our country.
Game changers.
All this is because of mismanagement and lack of effective regulation, which Jio is a byproduct of.
No wonder it doesn't exist in America.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/mobility-visuali...
> 35$ for 1TB up/down, 150 Mbps. Available in all major cities. Good enough?
But that's affordable for a very thin slice of the population. Remember that India's average nominal income, i.e., not PPP-adjusted, is $140 per month. Also, this only works in the better-off areas of the "major cities" (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and similar) -- there's a lot of the population who live outside these cities.
Considering local factors, wired internet is a marker of being upper middle class, or even 'rich', and living in a great residential area in a top-tier city.
Jio's rival Airtel owns satellite/cable tv platforms and even supplies wired internet in parts of major cities. No one with any ambition has really tried wired internet in India -- for a long time the only way to get it was via the government-run telecoms provider (who are -- surprise! -- not very good).
Jio's parent company produces a lot of movies in India and in Hollywood, including Arrival, Ready Player One, Ghost in the Shell, Lincoln, etc. They know the value of a converged platform that serves data + video. And they don't have a satellite/cable tv network because the Jio vision was all-digital, all IP. And they have been building the backhaul to do this at scale across India (lots of planning applications are online) and are now slowly trialling Jio GigaFibre (a Gigabit Home Fibre service) in parts of India.
What I don't know is if they can turn these trials into a compellingly priced proposition Indians will pay for (and get rid of their cable tv subscriptions for -- and cable is very popular in India, even wired cable tv -- even in low-income neighbourhoods. So clearly India can solve the last-mile wiring problem if they want to). But they have been able to do it with 4G and I suspect they wouldn't trial a Gigabit fibre product if they didn't have a proposition in mind.
Incidentally if you're wondering: "won't 5G make wired internet redundant" -- India has lots of cell towers but also lots of people connecting to each of those towers. This means that often speeds during the daytime are pathetic. I personally used Jio and Airtel while visiting India recently in May, and even web pages had trouble loading (on both networks) in the afternoon^. I suspect the effective bandwidth available per subscriber in even small Indian cities (1M would be small in India) would be quite variable, and certainly small during busy periods.
Sorry if this is too much detail. I just find the ambition involved in bringing internet at scale to an entire country (especially one the size of India!) endlessly fascinating.
^ May is 'peak summer' in India, and the afternoon sees very few people on the roads and the bazaars are deserted as people rest or take a siesta. I suspect internet usage goes through the roof then.
Can any one conceive of a reasonable solution to this? Ideally one which involves minimum government intervention.
I think people often view MNO in Cost / Data. In reality the Data is "free". The MNO will need a way to paid for everything from Spectrum, Telecom Equipment Lease, Rent, Fibre Connection, all of these are Fixed Cost. Unless something is different in the US I don't understand why the cost of Mobile plans are so much more expensive than European counterpart.