There is something drastically wrong with either Reliance Jio’s network or with TRAI’s method of measuring mobile data speed.

Reliance Jio’s mobile data download speed in January was 8.34 Mbps, as per TRAI report. It is a 54% fall compared to speed (18.146 Mbps) in December.

In December, Jio subscribers were using services under Jio Welcome Offer Plan that offered 4GB of high-speed Internet data and unlimited voice calls per day.

In January, Jio transferred all subscribers to a new offer – Happy New Year Offer – with a daily download limit of 1 GB per day.

While introducing new plan, Mukesh Ambani said, “…….. the other 20% of users consume disproportionately higher amounts of data, and we have observed that this disproportionate usage contributes significantly to the congestion that I mentioned earlier. In short, 20% of the users create a poor experience for the other 80%.”

The limit on free data usage was applied in January. This means that data usages per subscriber would have been would have been much less. Hence data download speed should have increased and not decreased.

The only reason for reduction in speed can be a drastic increase in number of subscribers. There were 7.2 crore subscribers in Jio network in December. If it adds 7 million subscribers in January, increase in subscriber base is only 10%. Let us assume that it added one crore subscribers in January, which is a very good number. This means that net addition in its subscriber base was 15%. This can’t nullify the impact of 20% subscribers with “disproportionately high usage” who have been restricted to 1GB from 4GB.

If Jio’s data download speed was 18.16 Mbps in December, there is no reason that it should be less in January. After all, we are talking about a network with an investment of Rs 1.5 lakh crore!

Is there something wrong with world’s costliest start up? Or TRAI’s method of measuring data download speed is wrong?