Oct 21, 2016 02:52 PM
2066 Views
India has always been a country of poor Internet connectivity and data scarcity. Data is prohibitively expensive for a vast majority of rural India, and even amongst the urban elite who can afford to purchase 4G data packs, connectivity issues prevent one from taking full advantage of the service.
The symptoms of high call rates and data scarcity, both in urban and rural India, are extremely visible. Users switch off their mobile data to prevent accidental usage or switch it on only after 10 PM when rates are lower. Owning more than one SIM is the norm as you want to be able to take advantage of the best offers from different telecom operators. On festival days such as Diwali, on government holidays such as Independence Day, and on made-up celebratory days such as Friendship Day, Indians rarely send out SMS-es or use too much data; all rates are hiked in the name of congestion.
More important signs of data abundance are the separate categories for Wi-Fi(Jionet Hotspot) that Reliance allots for each of its 4G voice and data packages. Consider the ‘M’(medium) offer. For Rs 499, a user gets free voice, 4GB of data(unlimited 4G data during the night) and 8 GB of data if you connect to a public Wi-Fi hotspot that Reliance plans on setting up across the country. This essentially means, at the very minimum, if a user forks over Rs 499, she gets 4GB of data for herself and 4 GB-8 GB(depending on how one interprets the tariff chart) of data if she manages to connect to an Internet hotspot.
