Jio 4G one week later: The charm is gone and so has the speed
Reliance Jio had started its Preview Offer in May this year, but that was only for a limited number of people, mostly Reliance employees. Soon after that the Jio SIM was available to people if they had a Lyf, Samsung, or LG phone. And a little before its public launch on September 5, the Preview Offer SIM was virtually available to everyone.
But the actual launch, and that too ought to be called beta until the commercial plans come from the January 1, 2017, happened only on the September 5.
Now, when not too many people were on the network, that is before the mid August, the Jio was a service incredibly fast. But using the Jio SIM when almost everyone has it or is trying to get, is an entirely different issue. And for most parts Reliance Jio Welcome Offer, which started from September 5, doesn't feel all that special, not anymore.
Crazy fast in beginning
A freebie is a freebie and you can't really complain about it. Having managed to obtain the SIM a few days before September 5 as part of the enterprise plan, I felt like the king walking around the customers who were in queue at Reliance stores. The next surprise came when I popped in the SIM into the phone. It was already pre-activated. To test the service, I used the SIM in two phones -- LeEco Le 2 and Moto X Play smartphone.
Initially, on September 5 the butter-smooth speed of Reliance Jio was like seeing a dream in 4K resolution. After watching YouTube videos at 720P for about an hour I got back to the normal browsing and chatting that I do on my phone. There was no buffering, everything was fast and all was well and good.
Then at about 11 in the night, the network just disappeared. Entirely. No bars, nothing. It stayed like that for the next two hours or so.
After September 5
Once others started using Reliance Jio, which is an assumption we are making considering that the Welcome Offer opened to all on September 5, the network turned sluggish. It became kind of a hit & miss affair. Normal browsing and chatting is still smooth more or less. It takes about 1-2 seconds to load Facebook on my phone's browser, which is good. The same goes while opening links or other websites.
I was downloading all the media on WhatsApp, while streaming music on Gaana app. On my earlier connection, which was from Aircel, doing something like this was nearly impossible. But on Jio it is possible.
Unfortunately, not always. It is possible only when you are in a room or somewhere stationary. If you are on the road or in the metro, the Jio performance is similar to what you get with other operators. In other words, streaming music on an app like Gaana will pause intermittently while inside the metro.
Downloading new apps from Google Play Store showed a new kind of a problem, which I have never encountered before. The "downloading" bar kept on running without showing remaining size to be downloaded. However, it started downloading the way it should once I was stationary. This is strange.
While downloading big images and movies from Google Drive was also a painful experience at times. At first it showed a speed of 80-150kbps, which is okay, then went up to 600kbps, which is around 6mbps. This is far lower than Jio's advertised speed, but is something you can call decent until it stays near its higher limits. But the bigger problem is fluctuations. It is inconsistent.
While on hotspot
Hotspot is also another thing that may give you moments of happiness and sadness alike. It is irregular to say the least. During the use I found that speed plummeted and rose on its own accord. If that was not enough, hotspot also caused the network to disappear from the phone. It reappeared after some 10 to 15 minutes.
Calls are bad
Free calls are not worth it if you can't talk. Reliance Jio app bundle has an app named Jio Join -- now called Jio4GVoice -- that allows you to make VoLTE calls. Just like WhatsApp calling. We tried both. Jio4GVoice was mostly good, the voice quality dropped at times but it wasn't bad enough to be unusable. WhatsApp calling wasn't a pleasant experience. There was a noticeable lag during the call. Breaking voice is also something we noticed quite often during the WhatsApp call.
Coming to the normal calling, don't even try this. A normal call over Reliance Jio network is stuff of nightmares. The whole conversation sounds like your friend is speaking in Morse code. Unless you know how to decipher Morse code, don't call from Reliance Jio network to a number that is on Airtel or Vodafone. We don't know the reasons. We don't know whether the fault is with Airtel, Vodafone and others, something that Reliance has alleged or if it is a problem with Jio. But the issue is very real and consumers do suffer for this.
To sum it up
Officially, Reliance Jio 4G has completed a week among public and with every passing day more users are joining the network. While Reliance Jio's promise of 25mbps is attractive enough, it also cannot be denied that the company is having a hard time providing that speed to everyone.
But do keep in mind that these are early days for Reliance Jio. Although on paper, the company seem to have impressive infrastructure, this Jio launch of September 5 needs to be considered with some context: and that context is this is a sort of beta launch, a very final testing phase for the Jio network. The problems are expected with this network. That is the reason why the Jio services are free till December 31. We don't know how this is going to play out in the future. Will it get better? Will Jio deliver on its promise? Or will it get worse, as more and more people join the network? We will have to wait and watch. But until the Jio services go commercial, and for that the date is January 1, consider that every service from Jio is part of a big beta testing.
Update: We have heard from Jio sources who say the problems highlighted in this piece are not widespread and are only limited to a few consumers. Also, the issues are set to be resolved soon as Reliance fine-tunes the network, they say.
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