The good old days of 2G and 3G connections are far behind us, thanks to Jio's unlimited 4G LTE offering. Started off as a free service, Reliance Jio has become the fastest growing telecom operator with over a 100 million subscribers enjoying its high-speed mobile internet at the most affordable prices. This practice put a lot of pressure on incumbents like Airtel – after all it is survival of the fittest.
Retaliation began, and offers on 4G data, voice calls started pouring in. When unlimited 4G data, free voice calls became a norm around here, subscribers were on a fence about which operator to choose. On one hand Jio offers the best tariffs (unlimited 4G, free voice calls and more for 3 months at Rs. 303) and on the other hand Airtel offers a close match with a promise of the best network.
Read: Which is the fastest 4G network in India?
Who should you choose - Airtel or Reliance Jio? After beating ourselves to the same question millions of mobile users have been asking on a daily basis, we decided to check both the networks in real use-case scenario. And the result... you'll be surprised.
We tested Airtel and Reliance Jio networks on data-heavy operations such as browsing videos on YouTube, Netflix and performing speed tests on certified apps. In video streaming test, Airtel appeared slightly faster than Jio. The live speed test results also put Airtel on top of Jio with a commendable margin.
We captured the speed tests, and video streaming tests for you to witness the Jio vs Airtel face-off live.
Despite Jio's consistent growth, which appears to be slowing down, Airtel is still leading the charts with majority market share in the Indian telecom market. Jio added 6 million subscribers in March 2017, which has been its lowest so far but higher than Airtel and other telcos. During the same month, Airtel added 3 million users, Idea Cellular came in second with 2.1 million and Vodafone welcomed 1.8 million subscribers to its network.
Jio has been at the receiving end of user complaints due to its ailing service. As the user base grew, complaints of slow internet and call failures started to haunt to telco. But the operator managed to sail through all the obstacles by giving its service free of cost. When the company's plans to continue freebies did not work, it launched a new scheme under which it is offering 3 months worth of service at the cost of just one month.
Jio's disruptive moves are certainly helping the telco to break the competition, but it is at the cost of quality service. The Mukesh Ambani-owned firm has promised to improve the network with more mobile towers in due course, but Airtel is already offering a better service at fairly competitive, if not the best fares.
The live speed tests and video streaming tests were performed during non-peak hours. In individual testing, when we tried streaming videos on Netflix and Hotstar at peak hours (midnight), Jio's network would struggle to stream more than 2 minutes without buffering for at least a minute. Services such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram work seamlessly on both networks.
If you're looking for a verdict here, Airtel outperforms Reliance Jio in terms of speed and quality of service. Jio has an upper hand with its fares and delivers a decent quality of service for daily operations such as social networking and communication-via internet-based apps.
