India's Reliance Jio is already the world's biggest data carrier

In less than two months since its commercial launch, India’s Reliance Jio is already seeing and handling more data traffic on its network than any other telecom operator in the world. 

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The '4G-only' network is currently seeing data usage of 16,000TB per day, according to analysts at financial services company Credit Suisse. This is by far the largest data usage any carrier handles on a typical day, the analysts noted. In comparison, China Mobile registers a data usage of 12,000TB on its network every day, whereas Vodafone Global fares 6,000TB per day.

India’s largest industrial house, RIL launched the Reliance Jio network with much fanfare and enticing 'Welcome Offer' to the public on Sept. 5. Under the offer, Jio is giving users 4GB of 4G data and unlimited voice calls each day. The company is also offering users access to a fleet of music, movies, and TV streaming services at no cost. 

It became immediately clear that people wanted to hop on Reliance’s free 4G data and voice calls, with hundreds lining up outside the company's stores to get a SIM card. In a price sensitive market such as India, where many are cautious about every megabyte of data they consume, Reliance Jio is naturally attracting millions of customers and they are really making a good use of it, it appears. 

Reliance Jio announced earlier this month that it has over 16 million subscribers on its network. The company also claimed that it was adding between 600,000 to 1.1 million subscribers to its network each day. Before the commercial launch, Reliance Jio tested its network with roughly two million early adopters for nine months.

That's not to say that Reliance Jio is efficiently handling the hammering data requests on its network. Several people have complained that the download and upload speeds on the network have significantly dropped. Earlier this month, Ookla, the Seattle-based company that makes the popular Speedtest.net app corroborated on those clams, noting that the download speeds on Jio had dropped from 11.31 Mbps to 8.77 Mbps as of last month. Given that Reliance Jio is yet to begin charging customers for the data, and the world-class voluminous traffic it is seeing on its network, we aren't really complaining.