Reliance (Jio's parent company) spent years laying down a fiber optic network in the country before they announced Jio. To get subscribers off their current plans they _had_ to provide extraordinarily low prices. When they first launched, they gave away about 4GB of 4G data per day for free for the first year to all new subscribers. This shook the market up so much that the congestion was in the process for procuring a Jio SIM as they were all sold out.
I think people on this thread are overstating the data quality problems. I don't live in India anymore but I still retain a Vodafone SIM card that I use when I travel back. On their 4G plan, I easily get 15Mbps, which is enough to stream full HD videos if you wanted to. 4K on the phone is not a requirement for most people as I don't know of any phones with full 4K displays in the market.
The market is actually doing very well, especially compared to North America (where I currently live).
> Reliance just like any other telecom operator was laying cables which they could even lease to other private players.
Jio's network infrastructure is far advanced when compared to other operations. They didn't just build it by keeping 4G in mind. It can support 5G and follow up generations without a lot of modifications. Incumbent operators had to upgrade their 2G/3G infra to support 4G. In fact, lack of 2G/3G service is a reason why Jio doesn't operate in Andaman & Nicobar islands where it's mandatory for operators to support 2G/3G service.
> But what exactly gave them enough confidence to go ahead with Jio, a deep discounted mobile network.
I would say it was access to funding and top-level infra. Not to forget, the industry was stagnant when it comes to high prices.
I guess I forgot to include the little fact that Reliance is the biggest conglomerate in India and it's owner is India's richest person. Even if Jio had crashed, it would have made a very small dent in Reliance's fortunes.
I included the fibre optic network because most of the other operators don't have a high capacity network like that across the country. Owning your own infrastructure allows you to undercut your opponents because you don't really have to ameliorate them to get access to their infrastructure.
Why is a promotional discount anti trust waiting to happen?
I mean, in the US, Tesla is giving away promotional battery capacity for free, which they're taking away after a few months. That sounds more egregious than anything else.
And many cable providers give discounted rates for the first few months, after which the rate goes up.
> What gave so much confidence to Jio to discount that much? Did their flavor of party come to power during that time?
Not sure what kind of conspiracy you're thinking of. Jio is actually funded through Debt financing. Many Indian and non-Indian banks have given huge loans to Jio[1][2].
Also, India would have better date quality if market was open to foreign players without requiring Indian stakes.
India has very high density in many areas where these kind of data rates are possible and we all would be on 1gbps connections