Riding on the Jio wave, 2018 will see India gradually move away from being a developing 4G country, overcoming the hiccups necessary to become a full-grown 4G power, a new report said on Friday.
London-based OpenSignal, which specialises in crowdsourced wireless coverage mapping all over the world, said that Jio's market entry kicked off an intense price war in the telecom scene in India, resulting in offerings of cheaper LTE services from all operators, driving more consumers to 4G than ever before
"The trend will continue next year. Whether Jio remains the huge dominant driver in 4G growth remains to be seen. After a year of free and steeply discounted data pricing, Jio may make 2018 the year it raises prices. That could level the playing field for India's operators," said[1] Andrea Toth from OpenSignal[2].
"Jio's widespread 4G access, along with its at-first free and later heavily discounted data and voice plans, quickly won the hearts - and wallets - of more than 100 million mobile users across the country," Toth added.
India's current mobile data subscriber penetration stands at 40 percent which is expected to double to 80 percent by 2022, according to Crisil's predictions.
"LTE services have taken the leading role in the unprecedented increase of data users in the past year, in large part thanks to Jio," the report said.
During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI data.
"LTE availability in India is remarkable. The users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84 percent of the time - a rise of over 10 percentage points from a year earlier....