[piyush_soni]

Yes, he is the game changer when it comes to bringing fast and cheap internet in India (along with unlimited calls, data, 'national roaming' etc.). Unlike some countries like US, national roaming wasn't really free in India until Jio happened. So much that it forced every other telecom company in India to have similar plans (at least close to that) even if that meant huge downfall in their profit. Such is the power of Mukesh Ambani.

But, if someone is thinking the reason behind it is his philanthropy or something, forget about it. He's the biggest businessman in India, and just wants to capture all the market and all of its 'data'. Ambani wants his company to become India's Google.

That being said, thanks to him, literally (almost) everyone in India is on the internet these days.

[rdsubhas]

I have to also add, that the same parent company (Reliance) was also responsible for the mobile phone explosion[1][2] in India in 2002-03, at the very same price point. I can still remember the long queues in my hometown (pretty distant 2nd tier city) to get a hand on the Rs. 500 phone on the days before. They essentially put a mobile phone on every Indian's hands, and forced entire market prices to come down. Before that, the average handheld mobile was way out of economic reach for most Indians.

Reliance has gone through a lot of restructuring, family issues and some shady flak, but they have been the major drivers of both mobile and internet revolution in India. Interestingly, both at the same price point then (2003) and now: INR500 (USD7 at today's rates).

1: http://archives.digitaltoday.in/indiatoday/20030721/business...

2: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/economy/story/20040105-in...

[Investopad]

Hi Piyush. Great points but would like to say that not even half of India has access to internet just yet. While Jio is certainly expediting this growth, we have a long way to go.

You can find my reference here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

[codegeek]

"500 Million by June 2018".

Even though that is still less than half of India's population, it is a bit misleading to put it that way because 500 million internet users is a HUGE number specially for a country like India where GDP Per capita is still very low compared to other similar economies. So I would say that is AWESOME. Long way to go for other things but Indians are way forward when it comes to Telecom/Internet in my opinion

[kamaal]

One reason could be lack of very cheap Smartphones. I mean like good sub 1000 rupees phones.

India has a great Android phone ecosystem and the sub 10,000 rupee phones are really good. But 10,000 rupees is still quite a bit of cash for many people.

[piyush_soni]

In my personal experience, poor population actually doesn't care about 'smartphone', though they care about 'Whatsapp'. Thankfully, Jio is bringing around 2000 INR (~28 USD) feature phones too, that will still run Whatsapp and Facebook etc.

[iamgopal]

The real intention is to earn by selling data centre bandwidth to internet applications provider such as Google and Facebook when India government make it compulsory for them to have indian user data inside Indian border, this is the direction where both Jio and government are slowly moving, if you read recent news on indian news sites and read between the line.