Airtel users downloaded 45 Million GB Data, Reliance Jio users at 13 Million GB in Q1 2016

There are doubts that Reliance Jio might end up delaying their public launch again. But that hasn’t stopped the telecom arm of Reliance Industries Limited to showcase its strength against the establish telecom players in the market. According to the reports for Q1 2016, the 4G VoLTE service rose up at sixth position in terms of the data usage. All thanks to its pilot launch for its employees, it was extended to family and friends last year in December.

Airtel continues to be a leader with 45 Million GB of data usage per month in the March quarter, while Jio saw 13 Million GB of data usage in the same quarter. This is according to the latest data available with the company. Note that for the quarter in question; Airtel had about 55 Million users using around 45 Million GB of data. Whereas Vodafone had 47 Million users, who downloaded 28 Million GB of data at an average of 0.6 GB (Around 600MB) per user.

Jio might have stood at the sixth number, which is considerable position as the telecom firm have only 70 Lakh users and yet to go commercially live. The average data per user comes out to be around 20 times higher than Airtel and 40 times higher than Vodafone’s average download cap per user. Now that is a staggering number considering the numbers against India’s largest telecom operators.

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Note that Reliance is currently offering data services for free to its employees, while at a very nominal cost to their family and friends. Moreover, with the Jio SIM is available in retail stores on the purchase of an LYF smartphone. Users get a bundle of offers for at least three months which includes 30GB of free data cap for three months. In a recently released report, it was suggested that Reliance would keep postpaid and prepaid plans at quite an affordable cost when compared with current market rates by 4G service providers like Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea.

If we combine the data usage of all service providers in India, the country had around 278 Million data users downloading 202 Million GB at an average of 0.7GB per user. This number is expected to increase as establish players are pushing their 4G services across all their circles. While it is expected that once Jio reaches 2.5 Million subscribers before its public launch in the coming months, the users on the 4G VoLTE service would be consuming around 50 Million GB of data per month.

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It is quoted by industry experts that Reliance aims to take this number to 1 Billion GB with an expected user base of 100 Million within a year of its public operations.