Jio 4G is not perfect but it's free and it's in beta,so stop whining...

Reliance Jio had started its Preview Offer in May this year, but that was only for a limited number of people, mostly Reliance employees. Soon after that the Jio SIM was available to people if they had a Lyf, Samsung, or LG phone. And a little before its public launch on September 5, the Preview Offer SIM was virtually available to everyone.

Jio on paper sounds like a dream come true. It definitely offers more affordable data than what telecom operators like Airtel and Vodafone bundle in their pre-paid and post-paid plans. It also, on paper, simplifies the pricing hell that telecom operators have created. With the Jio the pricing plans are all simple. You pay particular amount of money and in return you get lots of data and convenience of "free voice calls".

The actual launch, and that too ought to be called beta until the commercial plans come from the January 1, 2017, happened only on September 5 , when not too many people were on the network, that is before the mid August, the Jio was a service incredibly fast. But using the Jio SIM when almost everyone has it or is trying to get, is an entirely different issue. And for most parts Reliance Jio Welcome Offer, which started from September 5, doesn't feel all that special, not anymore.

The Jio launch of the September 5 is a sort of soft launch. And that is also the reason why it is a free service for 3 months. This are early days for Jio, the days when it needs to be fine-tuned. The whole network probably needs to be optimised, the bugs and glitches need to be sorted out. But to do all this Reliance most likely needs to test it as a real network, with the proper usage load that it will have to face once tens of millions of users are using it. To do it, there are two ways: One, grow it gradually. This means launch it first in one city and then roll it out in another. Reliance is not doing that. Instead, it has launched Jio almost across whole India. But that means it needs to use the second method, and arguably the more expensive one, to make the network ready for commercial services. It is using the first three-months of service as a sort of beta testing.

"This is similar to what big tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe do. They launch a new product as a beta. The Windows in beta stage is free. And so is Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom "

" The speed the Jio offers when the network is stable is almost two to three times better than what Airtel and Vodafone do at the same spot''

The Jio's rollout of September 5 looks similar. It is the way to prepare the network for commercial services from January 1. That is the reason why from getting the SIM card to service itself, it seems to be a work in progress.And because it is a work in progress it is free for consumers. When the voice calls don't go through, it is frustrating for consumers. But at least they are not losing money.The only mistake that Jio seems to have made is not tagging the service as beta. Instead of Welcome Offer, it might have called the service Beta Offer or something like that.

Most users who got the SIM card, unsurprisingly, were not aware of the 4gb daily limit that is imposed on SIM cards sold under the ‘welcome offer’. Once a user exhausts 4gb of data in a day, they are simply downgraded to 128 kbps speed for the next 24 hours.

What does the 4gb limit mean for a regular user?

For most, it’s inconsequential. Using 4gb of data everyday is nothing less than an anomaly if you use the phone like you used to before switching over to Jio.

Even for heavy internet users who regularly browse, video chat, update apps, listen to internet radio and stream HD videos, the limit is more than adequate.

In fact, unless you actually watch HD videos for a few hours daily, there’s a very real possibility that you may never even come close to exhausting the limit.

What’s the point of a limit that no one can exhaust?

This is where the 1 to 5 percent of users, who opted for the SIM to ‘really’ use it, come in. For a lot of teenagers and working professionals, ‘high speed unlimited internet’ literally translates to ‘more downloads more quickly’.

During research, we spoke to a dozen teenagers who got the SIM or were planning to get one for the purpose of downloading movies, TV series and games – all of which are enough to exhaust the limit.

To put things in perspective, an average movie download comes to around 700mb, implying that one can easily download more than 5 movies while still having enough data to get through the rest of the day.But as often is the case with anything that comes free, it makes us slightly more greedy, more ambitious. Having high speed data may prompt many to opt for HD downloads, in which case the 4gb limit can be exhausted by downloading just one or two movies.

Why the ‘unlimited data’ claim then?

Those who are a tad more technologically inclined know that there is no such thing as ‘unlimited data’.Data is not something that can be provisioned out of thin air as and when required. It is hardware-dependant. So everyone can’t have unlimited data all the time while being cost efficient.While the upper limits may be so high that one might never reach the ceiling, know that for all intent and purposes – it does exist.In the age of internet, ‘unlimited data’ is simply one of the most abused, overused and yet most effective marketing jargon when it comes to selling data plans. It holds true for those who never reach it, and is nothing more than a gimmick for those who often do.

Is Jio cheating customers by promising ‘unlimited data’?

Nope. The disclaimer was always present. Those who bothered to read, made a wiser decision by knowing the limit and then purchasing.If you’re wondering how they were able to market something as ‘unlimited’ without actually offering it, there’s a list of telecom providers, hosting companies, broadband providers etc who will have to be prosecuted for doing the same before one can get to Jio.While one can still argue that the company could have been more upfront about it, it seldom happens that a brand advertises about a ‘limitation’ to all its customers, knowing full well that it won’t apply to a vast majority of them.So, if you’ve got the SIM already, you can either confine your usage to the limits or replace the SIM with an option that doesn’t exist in the market today.On the other hand, if you’re someone who was considering buying a SIM for heavy downloading, you can now make a well informed decision. For others, who wanted to get the SIM for regular data use and calling, nothings changed.

But the actual launch, and that too ought to be called beta until the commercial plans come from the January 1, 2017, happened only on the September 5.

Now, when not too many people were on the network, that is before the mid August, the Jio was a service incredibly fast. But using the Jio SIM when almost everyone has it or is trying to get, is an entirely different issue. And for most parts Reliance Jio Welcome Offer, which started from September 5, doesn't feel all that special, not anymore.

Crazy fast in beginning

A freebie is a freebie and you can't really complain about it. Having managed to obtain the SIM a few days before September 5 as part of the enterprise plan, I felt like the king walking around the customers who were in queue at Reliance stores. The next surprise came when I popped in the SIM into the phone. It was already pre-activated. To test the service, I used the SIM in two phones -- LeEco Le 2 and Moto X Play smartphone.

Initially, on September 5 the butter-smooth speed of Reliance Jio was like seeing a dream in 4K resolution. After watching YouTube videos at 720P for about an hour I got back to the normal browsing and chatting that I do on my phone. There was no buffering, everything was fast and all was well and good.

Then at about 11 in the night, the network just disappeared. Entirely. No bars, nothing. It stayed like that for the next two hours or so.

After September 5

Once others started using Reliance Jio, which is an assumption we are making considering that the Welcome Offer opened to all on September 5, the network turned sluggish. It became kind of a hit & miss affair. Normal browsing and chatting is still smooth more or less. It takes about 1-2 seconds to load Facebook on my phone's browser, which is good. The same goes while opening links or other websites.

I was downloading all the media on WhatsApp, while streaming music on Gaana app. On my earlier connection, which was from Aircel, doing something like this was nearly impossible. But on Jio it is possible.

Unfortunately, not always. It is possible only when you are in a room or somewhere stationary. If you are on the road or in the metro, the Jio performance is similar to what you get with other operators. In other words, streaming music on an app like Gaana will pause intermittently while inside the metro.  

Downloading new apps from Google Play Store showed a new kind of a problem, which I have never encountered before. The "downloading" bar kept on running without showing remaining size to be downloaded. However, it started downloading the way it should once I was stationary. This is strange.

While downloading big images and movies from Google Drive was also a painful experience at times. At first it showed a speed of 80-150kbps, which is okay, then went up to 600kbps, which is around 6mbps. This is far lower than Jio's advertised speed, but is something you can call decent until it stays near its higher limits. But the bigger problem is fluctuations. It is inconsistent.

While on hotspot

Hotspot is also another thing that may give you moments of happiness and sadness alike. It is irregular to say the least. During the use I found that speed plummeted and rose on its own accord. If that was not enough, hotspot also caused the network to disappear from the phone. It reappeared after some 10 to 15 minutes.

Calls are bad

Free calls are not worth it if you can't talk. Reliance Jio app bundle has an app named Jio Join -- now called Jio4GVoice -- that allows you to make VoLTE calls. Just like WhatsApp calling. We tried both. Jio4GVoice was mostly good, the voice quality dropped at times but it wasn't bad enough to be unusable. WhatsApp calling wasn't a pleasant experience. There was a noticeable lag during the call. Breaking voice is also something we noticed quite often during the WhatsApp call.

Coming to the normal calling, don't even try this. A normal call over Reliance Jio network is stuff of nightmares. The whole conversation sounds like your friend is speaking in Morse code. Unless you know how to decipher Morse code, don't call from Reliance Jio network to a number that is on Airtel or Vodafone. We don't know the reasons. We don't know whether the fault is with Airtel, Vodafone and others, something that Reliance has alleged or if it is a problem with Jio. But the issue is very real and consumers do suffer for this.

To sum it up

Officially, Reliance Jio 4G has completed a week among public and with every passing day more users are joining the network. While Reliance Jio's promise of 25mbps is attractive enough, it also cannot be denied that the company is having a hard time providing that speed to everyone.But do keep in mind that these are early days for Reliance Jio. Although on paper, the company seem to have impressive infrastructure, this Jio launch of September 5 needs to be considered with some context: and that context is this is a sort of beta launch, a very final testing phase for the Jio network. The problems are expected with this network. That is the reason why the Jio services are free till December 31. We don't know how this is going to play out in the future. Will it get better? Will Jio deliver on its promise? Or will it get worse, as more and more people join the network? We will have to wait and watch. But until the Jio services go commercial, and for that the date is January 1, consider that every service from Jio is part of a big beta testing.Update: We have heard from Jio sources who say the problems highlighted in this piece are not widespread and are only limited to a few consumers. Also, the issues are set to be resolved soon as Reliance fine-tunes the network, they say.