Moving away from its underdog status, Reliance Jio has gripped the Indian telecom market with its compelling prices that have caused a major upheaval in the industry. Last month, Jio’s 4G network had the best download speed among all the networks as per telecom regulator TRAI’s report.
The report, however, seems short-sighted and fails to test the telcos thoroughly across all their capabilities. It also compares performance of networks on 2G to Reliance Jio’s 4G network.
This is definitely not giving it a fair shake, as India has the second largest highway network in the world with 228 highway routes. India’s railway network, too, is among the longest in the world, being 65,000 km in length and behind only the US, China, and Russia. This is why the results seem to be based on an incomplete data set.
Apart from that, the tests have been conducted based on singular trials, which defeats the purpose of a rigorous and scientific analysis. Admittedly, all of TRAI’s IDTs have been conducted in the same manner.
The only convincing part of the report is that Jio fares better than Airtel, BSNL, Idea, Tata, and Vodafone when it comes to Call Setup Success Rate (CSSR) which is the percentage of calls out of the dialed ones that get connected.
On train journeys from Delhi to Mumbai, Jabalpur to Singruali, and Allahabad (now called Prayagraj) to Gorakhpur, Jio was the sole network to achieve the CSSR of more than 95%, which is an essential quality of service indicator.
When put under the lens of scrutiny, TRAI’s 14-page report (which can be found here) appears to be rushed and its analysis is far from thorough. It also mentions that the surveys have been conducted by an external agency, but fails to name the agency. We reached out to TRAI to find out the name of the agency, but were told the information cannot be provided at this time. We will be updating our article with TRAI’s response, if any.
