Jio has 5G everywhere, but doesn’t have the backbone capacity to support it.

Lolita_Magnum

Lolita_Magnum

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So recently, I have been traveling to a few remote locations for meetings. (Mostly in Maharashtra and Telangana)
I noticed that you will find Jio5G almost everywhere!
In comparison, Airtel mostly had them only in major cities/hubs but still sparsely.
The problem with remote locations are that towers are placed quite far away from each other, which results in almost everyone in the nearby region being connected to one single tower.
This has resulted in severe congestion in the backbone.
I am connected to 5G and I am getting pings of 1000ms+ with speeds of 0.5Kbps.
Resulting in poor internet experience, with even call drops and deteriorating voice quality.
The 5G band itself is not congested since the results are the same with 4G.

Most of the towers here have their backbone connectivity wirelessly, and when I reached out to Jio they confirmed that there is congestion.

Suspiciously, I did NOT had the same performance issue with Airtel. I’d guess that’d be due to less amount of Airtel customers?

Let me know if you ever experienced the same.
 
In my experience, Jio 5G has always been fine while travelling through remote areas. Speed was like 20-30Mbits/sec. mostly there, but that was much better than my expectations. Calls (via 4G) were also fine. I don't remember the ping I was getting, but websites were opening fine and messages were delivering (mostly) instantly in WhatsApp and Telegram.

However, I am from Chhattisgarh, so the experience will definitely be different, since it is not as developed as Maharashtra and Telangana, so less users/congestion.
 
@igloo True, I did think that their “unlimited 5G” offerings would be the real culprit. Knowing that nowadays even the most cheapest smartphones do support 5G.

@Zuke The issue does not seem the be everywhere, mostly at locations where there is only 1 tower for kms. Not sure if development has anything to do since we are talking about remote areas here. It’s just as bad here as anywhere.
 
Last week i visited Juhu beach at late evening and suddenly Jio 5G was completely choked ,barely just barely working
i had to switch back to my Vi 4G sim to make a UPI transaction

this was reminder to me ,that why i didn't keep Jio as main sim, sure it has excellent 5G coverage

but such choke points are still a thing almost 3 years after 5g launch
 
@Zuke while travelling from Mumbai to Howrah in Duronto express back in 2023
Jio 5G had signals in the middle of nowhere ,places where VI still operated in 3G or something
 
@Kyle Crane I had same issues with Jio in Juhu as well, which makes me think that their deployment (except for planting 5G cell sites everywhere) was not really thought out well for the masses.

Makes me wonder, what was even point of going SA if they didn’t plan on making it resilient.
 
I realized that I forgot to add a speedtest result, so here goes...

17604992726.png
 
While traveling and in remote locations, airtel on 4G gives better speeds than Jio on 5G. Vi 4G is also good but it vanishes at certain locations.
 
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