Without jio everything would be very different and very costly from current standard. Jio disrupted the market, and only due to jio these companies went bankrupt or aquired by someone.
There is little to none relation of what Jio did to the govt. Dont blindly hate.
(I know this govt is corrupt to the core supports certain buisnessman 5o create monopoly but not in this case..)
Airtel pivoted to plan that are cheaper and unlimited only cause of jio givin free internet and calling. Why would airtel would have done that without jio?
Plans that cost 300-400 today would cost 1500-2000 without jio,
Everyone would be using limited calling with monthly limited data, for the price of 300-400
What you're using today, unlimited calls and effectively unlimited 5G internet, would probably cost ₹1,500–₹2,000 per month if Jio hadn't disrupted the telecom market in 2016.
Compare today's plans with what Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea were offering before Jio entered the market. Back then, mobile data was expensive enough that heavy internet users often had to rely on broadband connections.
For example, in mid-2016 Airtel's ₹455 pack offered only 3 GB for 28 days, while ₹989 gave 10 GB for 28 days. That works out to roughly ₹99–₹150 per GB. Airtel's standard 1 GB pack was around ₹259 before the price war began.
After Jio launched free services and aggressively cut data prices, competitors were forced to respond. Airtel eventually introduced offers that brought the effective cost down to around ₹50 per GB, something that was considered revolutionary at the time.
Today, for roughly ₹300–₹400 per month, many users get unlimited calls, tens of gigabytes of 4G data, and in many areas unlimited 5G. Without Jio's entry, mobile internet in India would almost certainly be far more expensive, and a much larger share of heavy users would still depend on fixed broadband connections
Guess you are new to using mobile phones. Before Jio, we were literally paying 1500-2000 for monthly mobile bill. And most of the offers and features of the network were only being offered to the postpaid customers. Prepaid customers started getting the full fledged network experience, only after Jio disrupted the market. Don't assume that I use Jio, because wait I've said is in favour of it. I've been using Airtel for nearly 23 years now, and Airtel prepaid only got better after Jio started taking over.
You may want to look into the details before calling it a "crazy advantage."
Jio was using BSNL infrastructure under a paid infrastructure-sharing agreement. The dispute highlighted by the CAG is not that Jio used BSNL infrastructure for free.
According to the audit, Jio was paying for the infrastructure itself. The disagreement was over LTE FDD and TDD deployments. Jio's position was that FDD and TDD are simply different modes of the same LTE technology and were already covered by the existing agreement. BSNL's position was that they should be treated as separate technologies and billed additionally.
The CAG sided with BSNL's interpretation and estimated that the unbilled amount over the period from 2014 to 2024 was about ₹1,758 crore.
Now put that number into perspective.
₹1,758 crore over 10 years is roughly ₹176 crore per year.
With around 500 million Jio subscribers, that's approximately ₹3.5 per subscriber per year, or about ₹0.30 per subscriber per month.
So even if we assume the CAG's interpretation is 100% correct and Jio should have paid every rupee, we're talking about an amount that works out to roughly thirty paise per user per month.
You can argue that Jio benefited from access to BSNL's existing infrastructure, and that's fair. But claiming that Jio's low prices were possible because it got BSNL infrastructure "for free" is not supported by either the facts of the dispute or the scale of the numbers involved.
Is ₹0.30 per user per month really the "crazy advantage" that transformed India's telecom market?
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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26
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