Cricket fever is in the air as India Hosts the ICC world T20 championship. Reliance Jio the soon to launch telecom network is providing free public wifi service at 6 of the stadiums hosting the matches. The company’s WiFi network JioNet is available in Eden Garden at Kolkata, Wankhede Stadium (Mumbai), IS Bindra Stadium (Mohali), HPCA stadium (Dharamshala), Chinnaswamy Stadium (Bengaluru) and Feroz Shah Kotla (Delhi).
JioNet supports 68,000 connections at Eden Garden, 41,000 at Feroz Shah Kotla, 33,000 at Wankhede, 26,000 at Mohali, 35,000 at Chinnaswamy Stadium and 23,000 at Dharamshala Stadium. I picked Wankhede stadium in Mumbai to test the JioNet wifi network coverage, connectivity and speed. I had installed the JioNet app on my android smartphone and registered it with my non Jio number. JioNet app basically is designed to save the users the trouble of registering on the wifi network every single time by generating an SMS based OTP, making the connection a more seamless automatic process.
As soon as I entered the stadium the JioNet app became active and detected the wifi network. But for some reason the app could never get an authentication on the Jio servers. When I clicked on the manual sign in page I was presented with the standard SMS based OTP registration page and on following the manual procedure I was easily able to connect to the network. On sending a connection failure mail to Jio care team I received the standard set of troubleshooting steps asking me to make the device forget the network and then let the app scan and connect again which did not help either.
The signal strength of JioNet was pretty good and the connection stayed stable over the entire duration of the match. I conducted a speed test using the standard speed test app and got download speed of 14.4 Mbps and upload speed of 3.14 Mbps and a low ping of 10 ms using Jio's own server. Even with the large number of users connected to the network the results were pretty satisfactory. If any of you has experienced JioNet wifi at any of the other stadiums where it is being offered, go ahead and share your experience in the comments section below.
