Long queues and hours of wait to get a Reliance Jio sim card was a common sight across the country during the last week; that’s not surprising given Jio’s throwaway call price offers of free unlimited 4G internet data and free voice calls for first three months. However, there is a high possibility that Jio too may end up providing poor data services like other Indian telcos.
Within ten days of its launch Reliance Jio was faced with 52 crore call drops, according to a Tech 2 report. Out of these call drops, 22 crore calls were made only on the Airtel’s network.
Newcomer Jio of course placed the blame on Airtel and other service providers for not opening up their network towers.
The biggest network tussle Jio encountered was with Airtel but the Indian telecom giant finally agreed to open its network to Reliance Jio, but would this really solve the call drop issue?
According to a Hindu report, Mukesh Ambani recently said, the company was aiming to on board at least 250 million customers and has contracted Samsung to install 48,000 new telecommunication towers in addition to the present 1.3 lakh towers.
While the numbers sound effective on paper, ensuring uninterrupted services would be an uphill climb.
Currently, the widest and ironically the poorest network is operated by Airtel. The company has a total of 260 million customers across the country, who have been facing perennial call drops in the last one year.
So even though existing Indian service providers have opened up their network to Jio, call drops will still exist in abundance given the insufficient telecom infrastructure in our country
While Airtel commercials promise 4G connectivity even in the Himalayan mountain ranges, in reality you’d be hard pressed to find uninterrupted coverage even in the metro cities.
Let alone 4G, many networks like Idea Cellular, Tata Docomo; Vodafone are unable to provide a complete 3G connectivity everywhere in the country.
So it would be interesting to see how Jio will manage to provide unbreakable network even with tie-ups with major telcos, given that they themselves are unable to handle their own network impeccably.