Reliance Jio’s customer base has surged to over 5 lakh without having launched commercial services in the country. However, the average data consumptions by these customers, which are largely its group employees, their families and partners, has reached 18 GB data per month, as against the national average of 150 mb data usage, according to the company’s Strategy and Planning head Anshuman Thakur reports ETTelecom.
The highest usage of data services is coming from states like Assam and Jharkhand, he said, adding that the average voice usage is over 250 minutes within the first month of test-rollout. Interestingly, Jio customers are getting the data services for free as of now, which can be attributed to the high consumption.
The Company still hasn’t provided any specific launch date for the commercial launch. It however informed that network optimization if currently delaying the commercial launch.
"There is no reason for the delay. It's first time that the LTE technology is being tested on such a large scale anywhere in the world. As it needs a lot of optimisation, which will lead to some disturbances in services, we want to ensure that once commercially launched the service is seamless. In fact the only delay is network optimisation,” Thakur told media.
According to him, Reliance Jio wants to have a larger user-base of a couple of millions at least (up from the present 0.5 million) to do the rollout. Reliance Retail, the sister company of Reliance Jio, has sold over 1.5 million LYF-branded mobile handset units since November.
