Reliance Jio gets 7,00,000 users before the Commercial Launch in India

After launching the Reliance’s mobile service provider Jio on December 28th, till date it hasn’t commercially made available and there is no time frame mentioned. It was first available for the Reliance employees and later to their friends and families. Recently the company also offered the invites for the interested users who can get a Jio SIM by purchasing LYF smartphone. With every Jio SIM, the company is also offering unlimited 4G data, voice calls, and SMS for free for first three months.

Even without the commercial launch Jio already gained 7,00,000 users, and as guessed earlier, the company might give fierce competition to all the other well established service providers. By the end of March 2016, India’s largest mobile network operator, Airtel has 248.7 million subscribers while the Vodafone and Idea are second and third on the list with 197.9 million and 175.1 million respectively. Though the Jio is now very small in numbers, it is expecting to attract 2.5 million users before to the commercial launch.

Compared to data consumption on other networks, the usage on Jio is very high, to be precise it is 18.5GB usage per month per Jio user. Since Jio is offering free 4G data, we are seeing such a high usage, but once it launched commercially, it will be on par with other networks or may be slightly on a higher side. The leaked internet plans suggest Jio to offer 1GB of 4G data at just Rs. 100 while other service providers are charging almost Rs. 250. If this comes true, then we can expect high data usage by Jio users.

Till date, only 22% of Indian population are accessing the Internet and which increased by 40% when compared to 2015. With the availability of the affordable 4G smartphones and their increasing sales can boost the numbers even further. The interest in Jio SIM also created a 7% smartphone market for LYF smartphones, it is the fifth largest smartphone brand in terms of shipments in Q1 2016.

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