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).
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.