India becoming a ‘fully grown 4G nation’ in 2018- Reliance Jio may increase tariff

India is progressing to become a fully grown 4G nation by 2018, as quoted by a report by OpenSignal. It is predicted by Crisil that data penetration will be doubled to around 80% by the year 2020.This massive growth has been attributed to the entry of the most dynamic player in the industry, Reliance Jio whose users were able to access LTE network 91.6% of times in 6 months of its launch.

This score is the highest across the nation by far since no other network operator could score higher than 60% in these tests. This massive infrastructural development will certainly lead to the internet penetration and will certainly give a major boost to the Digital India dream of the centre. Though traditional players like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea etc. have increased their footprints in the LTE space but still is far from the coverage of Reliance Jio. This massive 4G network over LTE has been boosted by the free voice calls and affordable data plans offered by the telecom operators. The foray of low cost 4G handsets in the market is further going to push the infrastructural capacity and widespread network of LTE 4G network across operators.

To give anestimate, the 4G data accounted for nearly 92% of the total usage i.e. 3.9 million terabytes out of total data usage of 4.2 million TBs in the quarter ending June 2017. According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), this is a massive 500-fold increase in 4G data usage from a year ago when it stood at meagre 8,050 TBs.

India factually is the second largest telecom market in the world and now it is by far ahead of countries like Switzerland, Sweden, the UKand Taiwan in terms of LTE availability. In India, it is estimated that the users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84 per cent of the time which is a rise of over 10 percentage from a year earlier. However this meteoric rise in the 4G LTE connectivity has not led to the 4G speed where India takes a lowest spots among the 77 countries with an average download speed of 6.1 Mbps which is by far less than the global average of 10 Mbps. This drop has majorly been done because of the network congestion since more and more people connect to the network dropping the network speed considerably considering the limited growth of the parallel infrastructure to support this massive subscription users’ growth. Though the low cost data prices will attract people but Jio can increase prices next year but seeing the subscriber’s base this increase may only be miniscule. Additionally the telecom sector will expect a consolidation leading several operators combining their spectrum holding leading to a growth in the speed.