I'm from India. I can confirm this. It's because unlimited LTE data costs about rs700 per month or 10 dollars. It can be spotty at times - but it works. Mobile is by far the most used form factor. Search for "Jio" on your app store and you'll see a variety of apps like JioTV, JioCinema, JioNews etc.. That means free news, live tv and movies all for the price of a cell phone subscription. Jio is the name of the service provider. No surprise India has the highest data use - there's almost no need to buy a TV anymore to watch content. You could also imagine why it might be hard for Netflix, Spotify and Prime movies to compete in India - because those services are bundled out of the box (no secret pay walls and great quality) for the price of your cell service. The mobile revolution in India wasn't about the phone - it was about access to fast mobile data. India has the lead on this one. We're paying too much in America.
> You could also imagine why it might be hard for Netflix, Spotify and Prime movies to compete in India
Till a certain extent. Netflix, Prime Videos, Hotstar etc have much more variety and higher quality and some are VERY AFFORDABLE. Prime videos and Hotstar (HBO, Game of thrones, Veep, Silicon Valley like shows) can be had for $14 USD per year EACH. So upwardly mobile Indians can subscribe to multiple OTT streaming services (I do Netflix, Hostart, Primve Video + Apple Music). For the price of one Spotify sub in US, you can subscribe to 5-7 music streaming services in India.
For the rest, Indian creators on YouTube have pretty much surpassed every big name streaming company. TVF, Timeliners etc have created content which resonates with 18-35 year olds on an emotional level. Netflix et al. will never have that emotional connect so easily.
Plus with Netflix, you can share an account with family members around the world (2 simultaneous streams) and with a premium account, which is only a bit extra, you can get 4 simultaneous streams. Technically 4+ households could share a single subscription to watch with a TV.
T-Series is not comparable to TV Shows. Yes, it has more subscribers on youtube but it doesn't have that stickiness and loyalty that channels live TVF, AIB (did?), Timeliners etc have.
TVF created a series set in 90s India which resonated with the current late 20s crowd so well that it spread like wildfire. If tomorrow, TVF would launch a movie, it will pretty much fill all the theaters in the country.
I'd argue that stickiness has transitioned to independent content creators. Feels like an individual can always be more honest than a corporation even if they're in it for profit.
I honestly feel the opposite. It is so much easier to manipulate individuals into shilling for your product than it is a large company.
I would trust Wirecutter reviews more than my favorite YouTubers’ reviews, for example. The livelihoods of the reviewers is not dependent nearly as much on how well they are paid by their sponsor.
Thats mostly because of population density and sunk labor costs for building the infrastructure. Many parts of US are so sparsely populated that the densely populated regions have to subsidize some of the costs of buildding the infrastrcuture in those regions.
Canada is the worst when it comes to mobile services because they don't have cities like New York to subsidize the sparse regions. I mean the most dense metro area - Greater Toronto area has a population nf 4 million or so.
Any densely populated nation has very affordable mobile services. In my experience - UK, France, Singapore and SE Asia all have affordable mobile services.
Of course, no one can match Jio when it comes to price:feature parity. They have done what no other telecom provider in the world could do. It was and still remains one of the biggest bets in the telecom world and it wouldn't have been possible in any other country, except may be China.
If you look to Europe that does not hold. Sparse and mountainous countries like Sweden, Finland and Austria are the cheaper ones. It seems that it depends more on the population count of a country.
Actually, most plans are way cheaper than that. Most people I know are on a $9 or $10 prepaid plan for three months of unlimited calls, messages and 2GB/day. It kinda covers most typical video usage.
>Actually, most plans are way cheaper than that. Most people I know are on a $9 or $10 prepaid plan for three months of unlimited calls, messages and 2GB/day.
Jio has INR349($5 USD) plan which gives 84 days of unlimited calling with 1.5GB data per data. For 399, less than $USD8 you get 2GB per day. Airtel also has a similar plan. This is fueling the data revolution
”there's almost no need to buy a TV anymore to watch content.”
You’re talking about access. People don’t buy a TV to get access to content, they buy one to watch the content, whether that’s via cable, OTA, streaming services, pirating, etc. Are you saying that people in India are just fine with consuming all of their TV and movies on a tiny phone screen?
I know some people who don’t have a TV, but they would rather just not watch TV/movies at all than stream it to their phone (other than maybe during a long commute or while on the plane).
- "watching TV" to more and more people is youtube and other online video
- a lot of people in the US don't watch video on their phone because they would blow their data plan in short order. Even unlimited plans throttle in various ways when you go over a certain amount.
Cell servicss like Jio bundle in live tv for free as well as on demand cinema. So the value prop to pay for a provider separately to get services on your TV is decreased. It's a separate cost for the same thing. So people are more likely to probably purchase new cellular connected tablets - rather than TVs.
In the US, my phone is on Wifi pretty much most of time during the day. When I am at work, my phone is on Wifi. When I get home, it is on Wifi as well. When I go to Starbucks, my phone connects to Wifi automatically. India has very limited wifi access. The overall data usage is still a lot higher in the US than in India.
Ah this must explain why india has the worst network congestion and reliability out of all countries on apps I’ve worked on (and they are fairly worldwide apps)
It also depends in the regular income. YouTube music costs $10 per month, I would have never paid that when I was in India, where I could just skip the ad & the cost of data for video YouTube is not much. About 3GBs daily, for Rs 284 for two months, or about $4 total, 4G where available, 3G other places. Before Jio launch, the data cost were same without the word DAily, so about $4 for 3 GB TOTAL in a month.
Damn. We’re paying too much in South Africa! It’s way more expensive here. But I guess the carriers charge what they can get away with. Data is also a lot cheaper in Kenya for the average person. Here in SA its still out of reach for many people.
GP is asking about unlimited data, not unlimited calls. I am not sure Jio or any other provider gives that for such a low rate as you mention, although they may give it for a higher rate (not sure). Also, not sure if the FUP (Fair Use Policy) is still in place (informally called by users by another #### name).
Reliance (Jio's parent company) spent years laying down a fiber optic network in the country before they announced Jio. To get subscribers off their current plans they _had_ to provide extraordinarily low prices. When they first launched, they gave away about 4GB of 4G data per day for free for the first year to all new subscribers. This shook the market up so much that the congestion was in the process for procuring a Jio SIM as they were all sold out.
I think people on this thread are overstating the data quality problems. I don't live in India anymore but I still retain a Vodafone SIM card that I use when I travel back. On their 4G plan, I easily get 15Mbps, which is enough to stream full HD videos if you wanted to. 4K on the phone is not a requirement for most people as I don't know of any phones with full 4K displays in the market.
The market is actually doing very well, especially compared to North America (where I currently live).
> Reliance just like any other telecom operator was laying cables which they could even lease to other private players.
Jio's network infrastructure is far advanced when compared to other operations. They didn't just build it by keeping 4G in mind. It can support 5G and follow up generations without a lot of modifications. Incumbent operators had to upgrade their 2G/3G infra to support 4G. In fact, lack of 2G/3G service is a reason why Jio doesn't operate in Andaman & Nicobar islands where it's mandatory for operators to support 2G/3G service.
> But what exactly gave them enough confidence to go ahead with Jio, a deep discounted mobile network.
I would say it was access to funding and top-level infra. Not to forget, the industry was stagnant when it comes to high prices.
I guess I forgot to include the little fact that Reliance is the biggest conglomerate in India and it's owner is India's richest person. Even if Jio had crashed, it would have made a very small dent in Reliance's fortunes.
I included the fibre optic network because most of the other operators don't have a high capacity network like that across the country. Owning your own infrastructure allows you to undercut your opponents because you don't really have to ameliorate them to get access to their infrastructure.
Why is a promotional discount anti trust waiting to happen?
I mean, in the US, Tesla is giving away promotional battery capacity for free, which they're taking away after a few months. That sounds more egregious than anything else.
And many cable providers give discounted rates for the first few months, after which the rate goes up.
> What gave so much confidence to Jio to discount that much? Did their flavor of party come to power during that time?
Not sure what kind of conspiracy you're thinking of. Jio is actually funded through Debt financing. Many Indian and non-Indian banks have given huge loans to Jio[1][2].
Jio revolution is the main reason for this, after Jio almost every other vendor is giving you 30Gb(1Gb per day) for $5-6 , no wonder, there is a %30-40 utilization of data.
Majority of this utilization would be on Streaming, Torrent downloads etc etc, Also to note that , many of the calls made in India are VOLTE calls..
Jio is fascinating. I once held a talk at an event where their Interim CISO Karsten Nohl was also speaking.
The way Jio was built and what challenges they faced trying to build a gigantic mobile operator from scratch and building it secure from day one are a story i'd like to read a book about, but I'm already glad he held a talk about it.
The most interesting part was their realization that there was nearly no "new & secure" hardware available they could buy off the shelf, most came with old unpatched versions of software, many had components that simply had no update functionality at all, some had but required manual onsite intervention for updates, just what you need when you want to connect one of the largest countries on this planet. This was not third-rate stuff from China, he was talking Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei... the name brands involved in this space.
Fascinating and astounding what went on at this time at Jio and i'm grateful that sometimes people that deeply care about these issues get into these positions and get to fight these demons.
They had the advantage that they did not have any legacy systems to take care off. All the other operators have to take care of 2G and 3G network supporting infra along with putting in investment for 4G.
So, Jio had a lot of money to use to grab the customers by offering free deals. They applied the approach of cannibalistic business growth.
Also, there network is not good anymore now, as the subscriber base has grown. I have seen cross connects happening which used to happen in the days of landlines.
Cross-connect, not sure if all know it by the same name, is when you call a number and you get connected to some other number. I have never faced this with other providers like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone in 13+ years of mobile phone usage.
Jio is now in the same league as others, and is actually bad at the customer front level when compared to Airtel and Vodafone+Idea.
This is from my own experience and of those in the close circle.
offer free deals
build a large customer base very quickly
take a large chunk off competitors' customers
offer much cheaper plans than competition
kill some competitors, make others struggle to survive.
gradually increase tariff. start making profits.
all you need is a large chunk of money, or absurdly low-cost loans, or some govt "assistance", or a mix of these, to last until that "start making profits" line.
I believe they are trying to make money out of other services by commoditizing internet. It seems unlikely that this aggressive pricing is to elbow out of the competitors because in this age, the tech companies normally have short-lived monopoly and long bets don't make much sense.
Gigantic is right, often, when it comes to telecom.
Some years ago I worked on a Unix/C/Oracle software project for VSNL, a public sector or quasi-government entity that was India's telecom carrier to/from abroad (V for the word Videsh, which means foreign country in Hindi). Worked onsite in their office in Mumbai, near the (Arabian) Sea coast, where international telecom cables probably come in. There was a huge telecom switch installed there. It was like the size of several really high refrigerators pushed together. First time I had seen one. Some Oriental-looking engineers were working on it (could have been from some Japanese company like Fujitsu or whatever, which might have been into that line of products - switches). I asked our VSNL contact there what the thing was, and he said it was the main telecom switch for connectivity between the outside world and India, and cost about INR 200 crore (IIRC).
I totally agree with you. Even though Jio has blocked many torrent website, still people find holes to download the content. Normally people subscribe for the 1 or 1.5 GB/day plan, which was earlier very much affordable compared to other operators. Not others too have reduced their prices to stay in competition.
One advantage is that Jio was totally new to the market so they started with 4G networks directly. The connectivity, voice clarity and bandwidth was very good due to only-4G network. Other operators were are still working on 2G, 3G and 4G.
I had earlier worked for Jio for 5 years and I feel proud today that I contributed for the country - in allowing the easy access of data to public. I remember, before 6 years I used to get 1 GB data for Rs. 250. Today for the same amount I can nearly get 50 GB data.
My wife also worked for Jio and today is her last day. I feel very sad now.
> Even though Jio has blocked many torrent website, still people find holes to download the content.
In my experience, a lot of people I know switched streaming services instead of torrents. Amazon prime and Hoststar are quite affordable and have decent content now a days and people generally don't bother with the torrents as much as they did a few years ago.
Except for Netflix which is $8/month, rest of the streaming services are very cheap. Hotstar has content from HBO, Showtime etc. Amazon Prime is ok. There are lots of Indian streaming services with Indian content. A lot of data consumption in India is video content hosted within India.
Not comparing the content library, but the cost here. Netflix is not very expensive compared to Hotstar or Prime. The latter two are targeted at family watching. They don’t have the concept of user profiles on a single account. If you have a family of four with each wanting to watch something different without trashing others’ watch lists, progress, etc., then with Hotstar and Prime you’d have to buy four separate subscriptions. With Netflix, you get five separate user profiles for one price.
Also, the quality of video and the user experience on Netflix is leagues ahead of Prime and Hotstar (in that order). Hotstar is very poor on technology and design. It only has its content catalog to lean on.
While I'm happy that Jio is leading the data war, I'm little concerned about the competition (which is non-existent at this point). May be I'm paranoid, but I'm using Jio Postpaid and would never go to JioFiber to give away all my data.
Jio censors the web of its own volition including censoring torrents and porn websites [0]. And it is no secret that it does deep packet inspection and kind of has an extensive footprint via its numerous apps that I'd presume gather how much ever data that they can abt its customers.
[0] This has interestingly resulted in folks using Helo, Telegram et al to share pirated content and porn.
It’s even cheaper than that. 1GB 4G data per day, with unlimited calls (local and long distance) and 100 SMS per day, can be had on prepaid plans that cost about $2 (₹140) per month on longer duration plans (like 84 days). With additional discounts, this can go down even further.
These plans are provided by the other major service providers.
Postpaid plans (contract plans) in India are ripoffs, comparatively.
Jio's business model is not exclusively dependent on direct revenue from consumers. It includes content play on films, videos, music, news + subsequent ads. They've also indicated that they will be doing deep packet inspection [1] on data passing through their network to presumably build ad profiles of it's users.
The biggest telcos in India havent even started content plays. Netflix just entered India.
And we still have HALF A BILLION people not on the internet.
This is in an environment with constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to privacy (that cannot be reversed by the govt), a govt run mobile payments infrastructure that is literally a free Stripe+Paypal+Venmo+Alipay and perhaps the world's largest pool of software developers.
There are multiple large/successful venture funded startups in India started and run by non-citizen expatriates (incl women). English is pretty much the language of business and India-US/India-EU have excellent non-double taxation laws.
> govt run mobile payments infrastructure that is literally a free Stripe+Paypal+Venmo+Alipay
UPI or Unified Payments Interface. I cannot stress how innovative this payment mode is.
* No risk of fraud (can't approve a transaction without a PIN on your mobile) - fraud as in card cloning, malware infected websites running off with card details. Does not preclude social engineering where users fall into clever tricks.
* no privacy issues yet (money is directly debited from account without a mastercard/visa involved)
* anyone can make a UPI app (all banks have their own, Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe etc)
* no cards to duplicate
* you can manage multiple VPAs on one account, so I can create different identities for different purposes all debiting money from one account.
Exceptions - UPI still doesn't support recurring payments or subscriptions and some other cases.
But as a regular consumer, I find plastic outdated. I've never used WeChat/AliPay so can't comment on that but the only time I have to use a credit card is when I have to pay international companies (DO, GSuite etc) in USD/EUR.
>Isn’t Aadhar (fingerprints + iris scan) needed to have a bank account? If yes, then it’s a bit disingenuous to say there are no privacy issues.
Nopes. Govt tried really hard. Attorney General didn't really sound far from Facebook's primary lawyer. But Supreme Court shut it down.
>A cursory search will show plenty of press articles re UPI fraud. For instance [1].
I should expand that I meant technical fraud - your card being cloned on a PoS, or a malware infected website siphoning card details, lax controls by card issuers etc (Amex is notorious for approving payments with just the card number and CVV)
Stuff like this is hard on UPI BUT it is isn't idiot proof. You can't really make a system secure when the human victim willingly hands over information as was alluded by your link.
I believe Aadhar is mandatory if you're filing tax in India[1]. And the government earlier in the year passed a bill to undo some of the supreme court protections and facilitate sharing of Aadhar data with third parties[2].
So unless you're too poor to file taxes (or are not an Indian resident), bank accounts can always be linked to Aadhar, even if it happens via the PAN.
Re Aadhar -- HN readers should note that IndiaStack (indiastack.org, very popular with VCs operating in India) relies a lot on Aadhar, so a lot of people in Indian Startups have a financial interest in not seeing the downsides of Aadhar.
Aadhar being necessary for tax filing !== Aadhar is mandatory for operating a bank account, claims which you made in previous posts.
Yes, going backwards government can indeed find your bank accounts because you might quote them on tax forms but having Aadhar is NOT necessary for operating a bank account. I have multiple accounts, none of which have been closed or service being denied for lack of an aadhar number.
>Re Aadhar -- HN readers should note that IndiaStack (indiastack.org, very popular with VCs operating in India) relies a lot on Aadhar, so a lot of people in Indian Startups have a financial interest in not seeing the downsides of Aadhar.
This is exaggerated. People can lead perfectly functional lives without quoting Aadhar to anybody except the taxman. You're pushing it.
A huge criticism of Aadhar is that with Aadhar, a court order isn’t necessary. The Aadhar act allows any lookup authorized by mid level bureaucrats.
Also, given that a lot of Aadhar data has leaked (even the biometrics have leaked in some states[2]) and given the lack of privacy legislation in India, it’s trivial for private entities, including scammers, to know your bank accounts.
Wide availability of bank account info has enabled a number of social engineering attacks[1].
Separately UPI remains vulnerable to SIM cloning as the phone number is crucial to UPI identity.
You should check the Aadhaar amendments bill (previously pushed as an ordinance). The government is pushing for Aadhaar linkage on different fronts again, and is also making private access available and easy. One of the places where linkage is being proposed (as it was in the past) is for driving licenses and vehicle registrations.
you don't need an aadhar card to open a bank account only a pan card(no biometrics) issued by tax dept, which you can link with your aadhar card by your own choice. The govt wants you to do this but the caanot force you as the supreme court has said.
According to the Supreme Court ruling, "the Aadhaar number must still be quoted to file income tax returns and apply for a personal account number (PAN)."[1]
I don't have a aadhar card yet and I don't intend to get one. I have a pan card but I had it made a few years ago. I am not aware if things have changed, I'll ask around tomorrow for ground information.
Avoid getting it for as long as you can hold out. If you’re not reliant on government subsidies, the only coercion now is to link it with PAN and also quote it in the tax returns.
If you can afford the penalty for late filing of tax returns, go for that. There are still several review petitions against last year’s verdict on Aadhaar. The Supreme Court, as usual, is delaying hearing those. Check out no2uid on Twitter, rethinkaadhaar.in and others.
Even seen the balance sheets of telcos in India. They are drowning in it and very soon it would become unserviceable. In NPA (non performing assets) India is among top 5 in the world and recently beat Italy on this dubious distinction. When all government owned banks write off this money, it is taxpayers who will be footing the bill.
> Healthcare is dirt cheap and very good.
That's news to me because afaik it is damn expensive for the income level in India.
> This is in an environment with constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to privacy (that cannot be reversed by the govt)
There is no data privacy law in India as yet. The one drafted last year has many issues. Saying that the government cannot reverse it is naive. The government can make laws that side with corporates and itself, without providing adequate protections for citizens.
The Aadhaar linkage and re-enablement for use by private companies in contravention to the Supreme Court verdict is another sign that the government can, and will, do what it wants. The Supreme Court is unfortunately not proactive in issues that have the potential to affect all the people in the country.
>> constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to privacy
Considering nearly everyone (who isn't an ARPU "deadbeat") is on WhatsApp I would think the ruling doesn't matter one way or another because you don't have much privacy left anyway.
Plus, if the govt wants the scoop on anyone's private life, they will just ask Facebook to hand it over or else.... (ban WhatsApp, ban Instagram, block approval for cryptocurrency projects, harden data storage rules and whatever else a government can do to threaten a corporation).
I thought I recall hearing someone say that cellphone plans and rates are much more reasonable there. That it's not uncommon for companies to actually compete to lower prices. Is that true?
I pay Rs150 ($2.16 USD - maybe can buy a hotdog at Costco with some spare change) per month (stress the Month.. ) and get 1.5 GB per day (yes, that's data per day) .
To counter-act this simply position yourself on the other end of American ridiculous data prices: buy $AMT, $SBAC. Those are cell tower REITs. They're up >900% and >2000% since the 2009 crisis.
They are reporting a leverage ratio of ~7. My initial hot-take: That's a leverage multiple; not a ratio. Yet reading their formula they are reporting that 7 as DEBT / PRE-DEPRECATION-PROFIT. Thus such a formula is not an LTV but rather a formula one might use if one acknowledged the underlying assets only had cashflow value.
Using an LTV formula they look more reasonable at 0.7LTV. Which indeed is high, about half the equity common to the REITs I've looked at. Yet with a 10% return on invested capital it does not seem the infrastructure was overvalued.
Now this is not an area I know much about so I'm mostly hoping you can show me where I'm wrong and thus I can learn more.
Honestly I have no idea how their financials look like, I'm simply playing trends (I've even bought into BYND and exited at some profit). But one thing I do know is that the stock prices of AMT and SBAC do not look particularly different in the times when rates were going up (Oct 2015 - Dec 2018 [1]). Of course such behaviour could be just long term market delusions, so trade with caution!
In Poland I pay ~ 13.30 USD for 12 GB per month (with additional 12 GB on top of that for 1 year) + unlimited calls/sms/mms.
And my plan is pretty crappy in comparison to currently available ones.
In the UK Three does a sim only plan that offers unlimited data (I've pulled down 100GB in a month before), tethering and use abroad (including the US) for £20 a month on a two year contract.
In the US, if you're not on prepaid, you're paying too much. T-mobile and Verizon have reasonably priced options in direct prepaid. Although, you won't get much cheaper than $35, you should have more high speed data for that, along with unmetered slower data.
Third party (or wholy owned subsidiaries) MVNOs are often less expensive as well.
I have a PS4, and before Jio, I purposely did not update my games (Witcher3 had a 20GB update). Even after getting a Jio connection, it was too time consuming. And then, I found out I have 3 10GB vouchers! And I usually get more, the more ads I consume.
The per day limits get reset at midnight everyday, AFAIK. At least with some providers (or all?) there is no carryover of unused data day by day. It would be 1.5GBx90 only if the user uses 1.5GB every single day.
3.5GB/day, 100 SMS/day, unlimited Local/STD calls @ $2/Month at a remote town in India.
At peak hours I see 1+ Mbps, 8+ Mbps during least(10pm - 8am) traffic hours.
I use DNSFilter along with DoT & DoH for Smartphone. Stubby for my Laptop's Ubuntu over USB hotspot.
Yes, JIO changed data market with its bullish 4G investment. Prior to that, subscribers could ride free on with zero/month for only incoming calls. Now every subscriber has to pay $2-4/annum for the same ride.
Hello,.
also from a remote village but for most people jio has been economical.
I remember browsing at ~10 KiB/s on BSNL 2G network at 20MB/day for INR 4, now at nearly same cost, I can get much better internet, though not even near to foreign speeds.
Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate.
Hasan Minhaj did a show this week on Netflix, you should watch it - he explains pretty well how horrible Comcast like companies are.
It's weird. I'm an American living in Russia. Here, we have many more choices for cell phone plans. And they're all cheap and innovative vs even the cheapest US plan. Competition really does work!
Probably true, but how does that jive with the perception that it was all triggered by below-cost discounts from the likes of Jio to grab market share at a huge loss, and that it's not sustainable?
Jio don't seem to be operating at a loss [0] at all. From what I can see of the numbers it seems sustainable, though their fibre offerings muddy the waters a bit.
Had no idea about India, but I am gearing up to move to the UK soon and was looking into phone plans.
Even Europe is way, way cheaper than America. Why is it so expensive here? Anyone know? Is it just that a few companies run the market and can charge what they want? Or are there less nefarious reasons?
>Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans are in India. The reason this works is free market, unlike the US where the likes of Comcast have monopoly in the regions they operate.
What does Comcast have to do with the price of cellular data?
>Americans are going to be livid when they learn how cheap data plans
Why? They're cheap because the average income in India is 1000 dollars a year. And there is probably little to no regulation when it comes to setting up infrastructure.
Jio has set the entire market on fire. I remember 3 Years back I was paying Rs. 1000/month @ 1Mbps unlimited to my local broadband service provider. Today the same service provider is offering me unlimited data @ 50Mbps without change in cost!
Edit: Also, the entire network is ipv6 enabled from the beginning. India went from white to green within months on ipv6 graph at
How much of the 50mbps do you get though? Contention is one of the names of a high speed internet connection if the company doesn’t invest enough in the backend.
Or to put it another way, would you stream 4K video with it?
I have a 250 Mbps home connection and its 1:1. 4K is easily stream able, that too is via local ISP. They changed their plans in last 2 years owing to the change Jio brought. The only challenge is, that services are a bit spotty (in case of a fiber cut/ unplanned maintenance et al), but again, the speed and throughput more than makes up for it.
This mainly depends on the location. In the denser areas of the metros, speed is lower (depends on time of the day as well). But the coverage across the India landmass is pretty good. I was streaming netflix hd on mobile, while traveling to another city on a bus.
I thought the IPv6 change in India looked odd, thanks for pointing that out.
Although I’d imagine such a large addition should also be reflected in Google’s aggregate statistics, I don’t know how often they update the weightings for each country though.
Can someone explain why in countries with established infrastructure, automation and cheaper capital cost (albeit higher labor cost) the internet cost is around 10-20x more than in India?
Additionally, it's often ~5x slower than in 2nd world countries...
Mobile data in Canada is notoriously expensive. The official justification is that it's a large, sparsely populated country. The actual explanation is regulatory capture by a cozy/corrupt domestic oligopoly that has successfully lobbied the government to stop foreign competitors.
I remember visiting Canada (this was many years ago) and looking into local prepaid SIM cards. The cost of roaming data was actually cheaper than the data pricing on the local prepaid SIM cards...
When I worked on a project for Rogers I was shocked and surprised to see the prices they charge. Oh and the never ending confusion in those family plans! Hated that work!
Comparing dollar prices in isolation makes almost no sense. You need to at least look at average/median monthly income and compare via some normalized metric, like a variant of Purchasing Power Parity [1] .
Even if you do this, comparisons are hard. Completely different economies, market structures and target groups, subsidies, taxation, regulation, etc can all have a big effect.
Looking at India, it has a GDP per Capita that's 1/8 of the US, and an average monthly income of 150$!
That should give you a measure for how 10$ in India are very different from 10$ in the US.
>Looking at India, it has a GDP per Capita that's 1/8 of the US
Okay, then lets multiply Indian prices by 8.
Someone up the thread quoted this:
>For 6 dollars 50 cents, you get 1.5 GB/day for 91 days.
Where in the US can I get 1.5GB/day for 91 days for $52 ?
Before someone talks about congestion, this is India, with 1.3 Billion people and "third world" infrastructure. If that kind of bandwidth can be provided to that many folks where people are routinely using it to watch TV channels (see Jio TV), why can't we do it here? I think congestion and data caps are just excuses to wring more money.
Not to be contrary, but that is almost exactly what I pay to T-Mobile (in the US) for unlimited data. I also have great coverage in rural parts of the country.
Strictly multiplying by 8 isn't really a good comparison, as the cost of supporting such a network in India isn't going to cost 1/8th as much as the US. I'm sure there's a lot of room for the US cellular carriers to be more efficient.
There is a pre-paid T-Mobile MVNO called Mint who will give you 3 to 12GB/month LTE for $15 to $25/month, with unlimited at slower speeds when you go over your limit. To get those prices, you buy in bulk, prepaying 12 months at a time. If you need to buy extra LTE capacity in one month, they charge $20 for 3GB increments.
In reality though, I think many US users here probably get the majority of their bandwidth over WiFi and do not really use that much LTE data. But, if I wanted to replace my $70/month cable Internet with just a Mint subscription, i.e. the $25/month plus 2x $20 refills, that would buy 18 GB/month of LTE.
Absolutely not. Thanks for pointing that out. I definitely misread the grandparent's post to be monthly (which means I'm paying 3x). I think ~$2.16/month is so cheap that it didn't register as possible.
I do, however, have truly unlimited, which means I can tether without hesitation. T-Mobile does have unlimited plans at $35/line a month for 55 or older, but that is still twice the $18/month price.
As the sibling post states, there are competitive plans like Mint, or FreedomPop, which offer extremely cheap plans, but nowhere near 1.5GiB of data a day. So I guess we are much further away than I thought we were.
If things are competitive, it makes more sense to look at cost than PPP-adjusted price. PPP is an overall metric that doesn't always apply to specific items; it's not like the price of an iPhone is any different in India. And GP gives a pretty fair list of things that influence cost.
Not sure this applies to everywhere, but I can talk about Romania (Eastern Europe) vs. Western Europe.
Romania has some of the best Internet in the world; as far as I recall, you can get 1Gbps for like 10-15 dollars in most non-rural areas. I think that's partly because of the huge amount of competition that was present in the early 00s, when we had a ridiculous amount of ISPs per city, and partly because all the cables are suspended on top of lampposts, as opposed to buried under the sidewalks and streets. That's way cheaper than digging half the city for new, higher-speed Internet.
And also because there was almost no infrastructure to begin with. So when one was created it went straight to fiber, while the western countries still got plenty of copper.
Similar thing in Poland (although our network is in worse condition than in Romania, but we still can have 1 Gbps for about 18 USD, even in some rural areas like mine :).
I think this is quite similar to the banking sector, we have most of the banks internet ready, some of them are are mostly internet, with very few brick and mortar places. When my colleague went to Switzerland he was shocked how the banks there force one to visit them personally to do even basic stuff (at least in the beginning - in Poland I can create banking account without leaving my home, I just need to wait for package to sign in front of a courier) - and have crappy websites.
This is also a leftover of the early internet migration, now they don't have enough incentive to do it better.
India is a relatively cheap country to live in. You earn less & you spend less.
And service isn't that stellar. They say 4G but 400 KiB/s is average IMO. I am from rural india & used net before that on lowend J2ME phones, which was around 10 KiB/s.
Having said that, jio has done a great job, where otherwise 1GiB of 2G data cost >$5.
Total guess, but it seems like labor cost will do it? It drives up acquisition costs for getting customers. Combine with many customers not being very motivated to reduce costs, which both increases acquisition costs and reduces the downside from charging more.
I once used a 200Gb per month plan on China Telecom in Pakistan. I regretted buying it as it would need few days downloading things non stop to reach exhaust that plan.
One factor that helps operators in India is the massive subscriber base. Nearly a billion people ought to spread the high fixed costs of telco infra to a decent point.
Cheap equipment and population density, dealing with Indian companies is like testing your patience with their never-ending bid to seek even lower prices.
I think it is because there is much less usage of home internet in India. Thus what North America and Europe split between mobile and home internet is all on India's mobile.
This means that India is actually much lower in total bandwidth usage per month per person than North America and Europe overall.
True, but it also means that wireless networks are physically capable of replacing physical infrastructure, but aren’t in developed countries because of artificially high per gb prices.
I live in Arkansas, and my AT&T bill this month is $410. Granted, about $150 of that are payment plans for devices, but still. The base rate plan is $110, and there's a $20-30 per line fee for four separate lines.
I have an iPad Pro 11" LTE and an iPhone X, my wife has an S10+, and I handed down my 6th Gen iPad LTE to my 10-year-old. It's a lot more than "needed", and our aggregate data usage is 30+ GB/month, but still. The difference in cost is staggering.
It drains the battery, for one thing. For another, it's one extra additional step that I have to go through to get online on the iPad, and the lack of friction to doing things online that are more substantial than is comfortable on a phone is the primary purpose of the device.
Finally, I very often tether my MBP to my iPad, because the iPad's battery lasts much longer. If my phone battery is low I pretty much need to charge it so I can get calls from family. If my iPad's battery dies I'm merely inconvenienced for a while.
I have T-mobile. I have unlimited tethering but it’s only 512Kbps for tethering, which is surprisingly enough for light dev work in a pinch.
The $130 extra for an iPad with cellular and $20 extra per month for unlimited data on the iPad is well worth the convenience of having two cellular devices.
I pay roughly $210 a month for five phones and two iPads all with unlimited data.
T-mobile also has free data roaming in most other countries where we go on vacation.
4 lines with unlimited data starts at $120/month at Tmobile (and goes up to $160 or $200/month if you want to add tethering and international data). If they have decent coverage where you live, you should switch.
I live in Toronto, but managed to get an US AT&T plan because prices are so much better. I pay $30 USD for 8GB that carries over month-to-month. I outright bought my Pixel 2 though, second hand.
Bit lower than your $410, but it sounds like you have multiple plans, always buying very high-end new hardware. There's a point where you have to accept that this is an expensive hobby or luxury item. You chose to get all these devices.
> There's a point where you have to accept that this is an expensive hobby or luxury item. You chose to get all these devices.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not really complaining about the price I'm paying for the devices themselves; I included that specifically so it wouldn't be taken as if the entire bill was due to the data I consume.
> always buying very high-end new hardware
That's a pretty recent thing for me. The first new flagship phone I ever bought was an S7 Edge. I liked it enough that it made sense for me to upgrade to the iPhone X when it died. The 6th Gen iPad was an impulse purchase, but one that turned out to be a much more practical thing than I expected. Then I upgraded and passed it down to my daughter - she's homeschooled, and can access her online lessons from wherever we happen to be on it, which is very handy.
This is so true. My mom watches all her Serials, news and funny vids in her mobile. Our TV is deserted now!
Jio forced everyone to bring down the prices. Now all those companies have begun posting quarterly losses and they don't have a humungous cash cow like jio. This is not gonna end well.
This is exactly going well. Those companies had formed some sort of a cartel and were bleeding people (especially the poor folks) with their high prices. As a student in 2015, I'd never imagined having a data enabled on my Vodafone Sim. But then things changed for good.
Yes but when the competition is completely demolished by Jio they can setup the prices as they please. That's the problem. I don't see the govt doing anything to prevent complete monopoly. It benefits you immediately but not in the future.
I wonder how population density effects price for cellular carriers. One reason wireless is expensive in the US, to my knowledge, is because much of the surface area is sparsely populated with customers requiring more wireless tower infrastructure to cover fewer people (then costs are spread across most the national or regional customer base).
In dense cities, I imagine towers can theoretically serve more people. Obviously you reach a saturation point where a tower can only serve so many people and has to be expanded but I suspect this lowers infrastructure costs. One would have to be able to handle larger "burst" demands in a densely populated area though.
On top of that, I'm not familiar with topography of India, but certain areas in the US are mountainous and as a result, require even more towers to provide coverage (for typically sparse populations). In dense cities where you have near line of sight, I imagine that increases range reducing infrastructure demands some (though this constraint may be moot based on typical tower saturation).
In India I would expect cheaper prices based on that line of reason, though I may be missing something critical (I'm no telecom expert).
IIRC when the original iPhone debuted as an AT&T exclusive in the States, AT&T had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand in New York and San Francisco for 3G services, and this situation persisted for quite a while.
I suspect that while more bodies definitely helps defray costs, the marginal costs of expanding infrastructure once you reach breaking point are by no means cheap.
In dense cities you encounter another problem: with too many smartphones concentrated on the small area cell towers themselves can hit their bandwith limits. I actually get better LTE transfer speeds (around 40-50 Mbits/s) when visiting my family in a rural area of Poland than I get in the city center of Warsaw, the capitol.
Wow. That's insane! And still Technical Guruji doesn't get as favorable treatment from Google as MKBHD does (like giving phones one month before release to try, calling him in all conferences etc.)
and, this artificially low cost data is killing competition, which will impact a lot of their debt held by banks.
and to keep these banks alive, govt shall resort to some more "recapitalization".
effectively, Jio's low cost data is being funded by taxpayer money.
Last mile fixed lines are outrageously expensive compared to wireless infrastructure, with the result being that many countries with limited land lines have wireless infrastructure other, more industrialized countries can only dream about.
To put it this way: I had more reliable coverage and lots more bandwidth available just outside Mogadishu than I've ever had in San Francisco.
You'll find most U.S. urban areas are just as connected as San Francisco. SF NIMBY mindset prevents infrastructure improvements required to improve connectivity.
Paris isn’t particularly high density, and practically everything is historical, but you don’t see big ugly base stations everywhere to provide excellent coverage.
And their telecom (wired and wireless) rates are dirt cheap.
I can vouch for this. Currently, living in Chennai and we have 1Gbps connection for 2000INR per month where as in my native you'll get 24Mbps for the same amount.
[] Movie piracy: continuing through telegram groups
[] WhatsApp - people share videos on whatsapp a lot these days..
[] YouTube - Here I don't think ppl are much into paying for Netflix / Amazon, but YouTube is used a lot.
[] Others: services like hotstar, voot ( movie / TV live streaming ), audio streaming services. Most of these are ad supported. And of course, seems quite a lot at adult content..
This is what I observed in surroundings. Indian people don't care much about ads and that also has been a monetization strategy for jio. I personally don't use any of their apps but many do. Also their cheap feature phones embed advertising.
My initial thought was roughly the same -- I have wifi at home, at work, at the gym, at the coffee shop. The only time I go over 2GB in a month is if I turn off wifi for some reason and forget to turn it back on when I got to work/home.
But to your point, I also watch videos primarily on my laptop, not my phone. I also have a phone with plenty of storage so I can cache all my most listened to music, my audiobook, and latest podcasts.
I technically have unlimited data, albeit dropping down to 2G speeds after 2GB, but I almost ever hit that limit. The cost isn't a factor for me, since it's flat-rate. I know it is to some people, but it's the presence of wifi and my preference for watching videos on my laptop that keeps mobile data usage low.
Or there is no fixed connection available, so mobile télécoms aren’t worried about cannibalizing another department in their company by hitting the « ON » switch on cheap GBs.
In my limited experience, my Indian coworkers had 2 SIMs minimum. Some had 3 or 4 but one would likely be a promotional “free” one.
This was in Delhi and they said the providers could be very flakey. A back up was necessary. Some people also used their phone and it’s hotspot as the main source of internet.
Are having multiple SIMs common in India? Or was I just working with Software Engineers?
Almost all mobile phones come with dual-sim support. Some with the second sim tray being utilized as an External memory card slot/Sim card slot. This is pretty common all over SE Asia.
I’m asking about the need for 2-3 SIMs, not the capability. They’ve had them on phones for a while and it should become obsolete with eSIMs. The new iPhone features a physical SIM and an eSIM.
In this case, the capability is caused by a need. As the other person said, it's about optimizing between different special offers & discounts given by different mobile operators.
Source: Indonesian with family that needs two-sim cards phones.
Multiple SIMs are indeed common but I believe the drivers that caused people to have two SIMs will go down with time.
Unlike some other countries, India's mobile rates are very competitive (cheapest in the world, in fact) so there's little reason to shop around, so cost isn't a driver for multiple SIMs.
I was told of two primary reasons: One, India's telco regulator has "circles" which are basically zones in the country (some circles are essentially a state, but some of the smaller states may combine to form a circle). In-circle calling is at local rates. Out-of-circle calls had STD (long distance) rates applied. So you might have a 2nd SIM if you travel out of circle frequently.
Reliace Jio and Airtel ("the big two") have national licenses now, and I believe their users don't pay long-distance charges at all. So this driver to have two SIMs is disappearing.
The 2nd reason was -- different networks had coverage blackspots in different areas, and having two SIMs was an avoidance measure. Jio and Airtel, while not perfect, have fairly good 4G infrastructure and blackspots have significantly reduced.
Irrespective of the reason, the economic rationale for multiple SIMs was that a "pay as you go" SIM was very cheap to keep active. You paid a dollar or so and it was active for a long time -- 6 months or so (Jio never did this). With margins squeezed by Jio, other operators are feeling less charitable and want regular monthly payments or conversion to a plan to keep the SIM alive. The minimum payments are still ridiculously small especially in dollar terms, but they will pinch the less well off (given India's nominal average monthly income is about $140, there are a lot of people in this category). I suspect eventually most people won't bother if they're happy with their service.
There are other reasons (a lack of trust in the number portability process, India's lack of privacy legislation which means your number is up for grabs for spam calls and texts ignoring the regulator's Do Not Disturb guidelines) but until recently it was almost cost-free to have multiple SIMs. That'll change soon, I suspect.
Back in the day when India did not have number portability, one sim used to be the primary number and the other sim was mostly used for data which could be frequently changed based on the data plans available.
The only negative sentiment around Jio is that Jio isn't available in certain remote corners of India (only if you are travelling to remote villages) and that Jio GigaFiber (the FTTH solution) hasn't be deployed yet (The infrastructure has already been setup. Launch has been delayed as they are releasing it phase-wise). I am waiting to switch from my current FTTH provider to Jio GigaFiber once it launches.
I currently have a 100Mbps + 200 GB per month plan but looking at the tariffs of Jio GigaFiber I can get 100Mbps + 100GB per month + complimentary 40GB per month for a fraction of the price. Once Jio GigaFiber launches with proper tariff plans I am sure I can opt for the 1Gbps + 1TB per month plan for the same price I am paying my current FTTH provider.
I pay Rs 499 (~$7) for 84 days of 1.5gb data/day, unlimited calls, and 4g speeds between 1-10mbps. This is one of the best things that happened to India in recent times. All thanks to Ambani/Jio.
Even broadband here has reached next level. I pay $30/mo for 200 Mbps speeds and 1 TB data transfer. It's hilariously cheap. This is thanks to ACT Fibernet.
I think UPI is up there in the list. At present I make 80% of my digital transactions (and close to ~100% transactions below $10) via UPI. I can't believe something this cool came out of a body of our country.
If they don't have the infrastructure for vast modern cable based connections and wireless installations, why not use the already existing cell infrastructure? India isn't the only one.
Cheap data is probably the driver of this, but I've noticed a number of my friends and family from India love to send picture messages, videos and GIFs every morning to ALL of their contacts, simply wishing them "good morning friends". Then same again in the evening - "good night friends". It's a bit weird to be honest, and it wouldn't surprise me if the data added up to a significant number!
Don't compare your American plans, most of the cities in India are facing severe water shortage and temperature is rising every year. There are still power cuts even in the largest cities.
Air quality is worse, just look at the AQI index.
All this is because of mismanagement and lack of effective regulation, which Jio is a byproduct of.
Finland's monthly data usage per SIM is 23.8, Austria's is 9.9. Both of which are higher than the number quoted for india in the article if the assumption is made that SIM = smartphone.
Do most Indians have good internet access at home? As in, is a portion of this accounting for home-usage which is replaced by a home connection in other countries?
> 35$ for 1TB up/down, 150 Mbps. Available in all major cities. Good enough?
But that's affordable for a very thin slice of the population. Remember that India's average nominal income, i.e., not PPP-adjusted, is $140 per month. Also, this only works in the better-off areas of the "major cities" (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and similar) -- there's a lot of the population who live outside these cities.
Considering local factors, wired internet is a marker of being upper middle class, or even 'rich', and living in a great residential area in a top-tier city.
Thanks. I suppose my question was less about the affordability of a landline connection, but consumption of. Interesting that you said its a marker of wealth - but are you essentially saying that for everyone else it's not that common. At the heart of what I'm asking is: Did India skip this generation of high-landline consumption, and jump straight to mobile internet?
Jio's rival Airtel owns satellite/cable tv platforms and even supplies wired internet in parts of major cities. No one with any ambition has really tried wired internet in India -- for a long time the only way to get it was via the government-run telecoms provider (who are -- surprise! -- not very good).
Jio's parent company produces a lot of movies in India and in Hollywood, including Arrival, Ready Player One, Ghost in the Shell, Lincoln, etc. They know the value of a converged platform that serves data + video. And they don't have a satellite/cable tv network because the Jio vision was all-digital, all IP. And they have been building the backhaul to do this at scale across India (lots of planning applications are online) and are now slowly trialling Jio GigaFibre (a Gigabit Home Fibre service) in parts of India.
What I don't know is if they can turn these trials into a compellingly priced proposition Indians will pay for (and get rid of their cable tv subscriptions for -- and cable is very popular in India, even wired cable tv -- even in low-income neighbourhoods. So clearly India can solve the last-mile wiring problem if they want to). But they have been able to do it with 4G and I suspect they wouldn't trial a Gigabit fibre product if they didn't have a proposition in mind.
Incidentally if you're wondering: "won't 5G make wired internet redundant" -- India has lots of cell towers but also lots of people connecting to each of those towers. This means that often speeds during the daytime are pathetic. I personally used Jio and Airtel while visiting India recently in May, and even web pages had trouble loading (on both networks) in the afternoon^. I suspect the effective bandwidth available per subscriber in even small Indian cities (1M would be small in India) would be quite variable, and certainly small during busy periods.
Sorry if this is too much detail. I just find the ambition involved in bringing internet at scale to an entire country (especially one the size of India!) endlessly fascinating.
^ May is 'peak summer' in India, and the afternoon sees very few people on the roads and the bazaars are deserted as people rest or take a siesta. I suspect internet usage goes through the roof then.
In major metro cities fiber to home with >50 Mbps is common. Tier 2 cities and below have to depend on the state owned telecom provider BSNL who offers 2 - 10Mbps or cellular internet.
Well India has implemented ODF (Open Defecation Framework) where citizens can defecate on railway tracks, roadside or any empty lot openly. Millions of city dwellers are already availing these services.
This is surely due to cost of data. It baffles me that we have so much regulation and so many entrenched players that there is little room for competition, leading to higher prices. The question is, how do you prevent the natural monopolies of a finite resource (like wireless spectrum)? The first thing I could think of is stopping the Sprint - T-Mobile merger, but I'm not confident Sprint will keep its head above water much longer without it. Maybe it's better to have the airwaves resold? Or maybe not, as one of the big existing telcos will buy them at auction.
Can any one conceive of a reasonable solution to this? Ideally one which involves minimum government intervention.
I thought T-Mobile has been gaining more customers with their lower price and reasonable quality? And I have always assumed Sprint and T-Mobile merger will give T-Mobile more firing power to continue the fight.
I think people often view MNO in Cost / Data. In reality the Data is "free". The MNO will need a way to paid for everything from Spectrum, Telecom Equipment Lease, Rent, Fibre Connection, all of these are Fixed Cost. Unless something is different in the US I don't understand why the cost of Mobile plans are so much more expensive than European counterpart.
You can't have good internet speed, affordable healthcare and education for the same reason - they are entrenched businesses, and the government would rather back corporate profits than public good. And you can't build sufficient housing because previous owners block development in order to profit. The 1% must have their share.
