New Delhi: From Google India to Zomato, and Netflix to Paytm – the who’s who of the tech world lined up Monday to congratulate a company on its fifth year of operations. No surprise, they have been a beneficiary of the data revolution that Reliance Jio brought with its dirt cheap rates.
Data usage in India has zoomed 1,300 per cent and the number of broadband users grew four times since September 5, 2016. It was the day when billionaire Mukesh Ambani marked re-entry into the telecom space with Jio.
HDFC said ‘sar uthake jeena koi tumse seekhe’. Hotstar said: ‘From asking ‘What’s the score?’ to watching it LIVE, cheers to #5YearsOfJio.”
Google, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, PhonePe, Apollo Hospitals, Ashok Leyland, Tinder India, Voot, Zee5, Samsung India, Vivo, Oppo, Dominos India, and Sony Liv were among the lot that took to Twitter to congratulate Reliance Jio on its 5th anniversary.
‘Mi India’ said “5 years of fueling the Internet revolution in India.” Nokia on the other hand said ‘kudos to your commitment on keeping India connected’.
Also read: Reliance Jio to launch 5G services in second half of 2021: Mukesh Ambani
“Tum jio karodo saal! (May you live billion years),” said India’s biggest digital wallet firm Paytm. E-learning platform Unacademy said, “Here’s to helping India learn and grow digitally!”
Online food ordering app Zomato, which had in its IPO prospectus mentioned of the digital connect that Jio created, said, “Birthday cake is on its way!” “It’s #5YearsOfJio kicking off the mobile internet revolution in India (sic),” Micromax said.
Reliance Jio’s entry disrupted the Indian telecom market, forcing rivals to match its dirt cheap rates.
TRAI broadband subscriber’s report shows that the number of data users has gone up four times in the last five years. The number of broadband users increased from 19.23 crore in September 2016 to 79.27 crore in June 2021.
This led to an exponential increase in data consumption with monthly data consumption per user witnessing over 1,303 per cent jump from 878.63 MB to a staggering 12.33 GB from December 2016 to March 2021. This was revealed by the latest quarterly telecom performance indicator report published by TRAI.
Since the beginning of the commercial operation of Reliance Jio in September 2016, internet data cost has gone down by over 93 per cent from around Rs 160 per GB to Rs 10.77 a GB, as per performance indicators reports published by TRAI.
Experts say that Jio broke the digital divide and helped usher in an era of true democratisation of digital technology – empowering every Indian in the process.
Before Jio ushered in the digital revolution, India had 10 unicorns; this list has now burgeoned to at least 53.
More importantly, Jio took digital revolution to one and all. For example, the number of Facebook users in India more than doubled from 20 crore users in 2016 to over 42 crore users in 2021. Similarly, the number of WhatsApp users also jumped to over 39 crore in 2021 from 19 crore users in 2016.