Surprising none supports all Band 3,5 and 40 which are for India . I am looking for a MIFI with all 3 LTE bands . Dont want to buy a new one when RCOM comes in band 5
sharktale1212
Herald
That seems like a very pleasing experience and professional experience but the customer experience have not been to that level. One of my friends saw 10s of CAF being wasted before it was filled completed. The person in charge wasn't aware of Jio Money form and had to be reminded. Docs were not uploaded for hours as there was "Pan India- system issue" (which btw a dedicated Jio center wouldn't solve).
What could have been a better experience? Something like what you described, invite came with a unique url to fill form and upload all the required docs. Go to Reliance store, let them verify originals, confirm it and bill the phone. Sim activation done in minutes but no thats not the way they went.
Server issues makes me feel like we are back in the early 2000s, now even the IRCTC website does not give - server down error.
Got the invite, thanks to vaibhavyagnik. Got unable to process application error message though. The digital express guys said they will try to sort this out from their end.
I got my sim activated today. The speeds are atrocious at best. I am getting less than 3 Mbps indoors and ~ 25 Mbps in the balcony. I read about the Mhz thing and checked that. It is stuck at 1800 Mhz. I checked on IBF and it seems others in Bangalore are also having the same trouble with network.
So anyone in Bangalore, please be mindful of this.
As for @max_demon - I was able to recharge with the voice plan today to get it working with other phones. If its not then it wont work with any other phone than lyf
So anyone in Bangalore, please be mindful of this.
As for @max_demon - I was able to recharge with the voice plan today to get it working with other phones. If its not then it wont work with any other phone than lyf
Last edited:
You would have received message saying that you are on Unlimited Jio Lyf Prepaid offer. So that is your plan.
You can get the sim through the invite system only. Reliance top level employees can refer 10 people but you have you buy a lyf handset to get the sim. Member vaibhavyagnik was kind enough to give me an invite.
sharktale1212
Herald
Activation is just half the story. People have been complaining about speeds and latency too.
Jio support has been rather dismissive about people reporting issues on "indoor" coverage as if thats not a thing. In case speeds at your house is terrible and good at office or vice-versa, then too they are closing out tickets saying "user has utilised 500MB of data", which makes me think they are not taking even the closed public beta seriously.
Not to mention even if people are getting good speeds, it is averaging out to 20-30Mbps. This on a closed public beta, when it goes the 501/1p way, its going to take a turn for the worse unless they add more data by then.
Last edited:
sharktale1212
Herald
My understanding is they will overlay signals. So in case your area has excellent coverage for 850 that will be your preferred network, in case of clogging they will move around. Similarly in case its 2300Mhz in your area, that will be the preferable one.
Here's my review of the Jio network. Do note, I am kinda incensed by the speeds and coverage in this beta so take with a grain of salt.
@vaibhavyagnik was kind enough to share an invite after a lot of pms
Thanks to him for the invite.
The very first step was marred with issues, maybe due to yahoo id or something else. I have talked to others who got their invites and ~24-48hrs seem to be a standard. I got mine after 2.5 days, for god knows for what reason.
Walked into the nearby Reliance Digital with invite. After confirming the invite, store manager and me sat down to fill out the forms. The store manager said they have been trained for filling out the CAF and still tore up 3-4 CAF because he couldn't get the info right. There was confusion on if postpaid landline bill could be considered as PoA and what exactly will be the document number etc. He told me Jio will dock him money for every incorrectly filled CAF. Additionally, he wasn't aware of the Jio Money form, so I filled it out myself. This took 1.5hrs to complete. The store manager was candid enough to accept that this was not a timeline which a non-invite guy would want. Once in a while he suspected I was some kind of Reliance Jio inspector as I laid out information gleaned from forums
Once the form was filled out, it needed to be uploaded on the server. And it wouldn't happen no matter how many times it was tried. The store manager tried on store wifi, jio and I even shared my Airtel 3G. It just wouldn't work. Call to "senior Jio employee" was met with "server issue" as a reason. It was approaching 2hrs and SM (store manager) was kinda frustrated dealing with one customer, so he gave up and asked me to bill the phone. Docs can be uploaded later, he said. So I bought Lyf Flame 1, even though I wanted Flame 2 but the stocks had not arrived.
Coming to the phone. Its what you expect of a China build cheap phone. The battery compartment is too tight, it wouldn't come out so that I could add the sim. Touch response is terrible. But then 4G VoLTE at this price is difficult, unless someone can point me to a phone in this price category with 4G. So anyone rushing to Jio but wants a sub-5k (I think price will drop) will have to go with this. Otherwise use Jio Join.
After continuous pestering the SM was finally able to upload the docs after 24hrs. Order with Jio was placed. It took another 24hrs and more pestering for the SM to approve my CAF and forward to tele-verification. Once the verification was done, sim got activated in couple of minutes (total 48hrs).
The first thing I noticed after adding the sim to the Lyf phone was the signal was next to non-existent. Tried a speedtest and it kept connecting to Latur with below 1Mbps speed. Tried rebooting and adding sim to sim slot2 to no avail. So contacted Jio support whose first response was reboot the phone, take out and add back the sim to sim slot 1. Even after telling them that I have tried every reboot and sim slots, it fell on deaf ears. So tried doing that but nothing happened and I still got 1Mbps speed. They suggested getting Reliance NetVelocity app and the speeds were equally bad there. Later they opened a ticket for me to resolve the issue.
I took the phone outside on the balcony and got ~15-20Mbps fluctuating speeds, which again was not that great. So I went back to Jio support and had coverage in my area checked (which should have been the first step before getting the invite). Out of the EXCELLENT, GOOD and SATISFACTORY coverage, mine was "GOOD", they said. Nearest tower turned out to be ~1km away.
I did travel to couple of places, one of them being Phoneix MarketCity and found 40-50Mbps there (outdoors), indoors was just as bad. But when I travelled to office in Bellandur today, speeds were equally bad. Additionally when Jio tried to call me to resolve the earlier raised ticket, the call had no voice. They tried couple of times and each time had this issue. On a whim, I tried calling the Jio number from my office phone and got a "network congested" error. So its in beta and already congested.
So calls working only at home
Last point on the video apps. Jio Play has HD channels which played very well even on the shit 2Mbps speed. In comparison, I couldn't get Jio OnDemand to play any video even when I was getting 40Mbps in speed.
Here are some speedtests at my house compared with Airtel 3G, which for some reason shows up as Vodafone. While some might say okay Airtel has been in the game too long and has too many towers compared to Jio, the point here is to show Jio is not all awesome and sunny.
Btw, I figured how to change the server settings in speedtest so that I could run this against a Bangalore server instead of Latur:
Jio:
Airtel 3G:
In the balcony:
Jio
Airtel 3G:
@vaibhavyagnik was kind enough to share an invite after a lot of pms
Thanks to him for the invite. The very first step was marred with issues, maybe due to yahoo id or something else. I have talked to others who got their invites and ~24-48hrs seem to be a standard. I got mine after 2.5 days, for god knows for what reason.
Walked into the nearby Reliance Digital with invite. After confirming the invite, store manager and me sat down to fill out the forms. The store manager said they have been trained for filling out the CAF and still tore up 3-4 CAF because he couldn't get the info right. There was confusion on if postpaid landline bill could be considered as PoA and what exactly will be the document number etc. He told me Jio will dock him money for every incorrectly filled CAF. Additionally, he wasn't aware of the Jio Money form, so I filled it out myself. This took 1.5hrs to complete. The store manager was candid enough to accept that this was not a timeline which a non-invite guy would want. Once in a while he suspected I was some kind of Reliance Jio inspector as I laid out information gleaned from forums
Once the form was filled out, it needed to be uploaded on the server. And it wouldn't happen no matter how many times it was tried. The store manager tried on store wifi, jio and I even shared my Airtel 3G. It just wouldn't work. Call to "senior Jio employee" was met with "server issue" as a reason. It was approaching 2hrs and SM (store manager) was kinda frustrated dealing with one customer, so he gave up and asked me to bill the phone. Docs can be uploaded later, he said. So I bought Lyf Flame 1, even though I wanted Flame 2 but the stocks had not arrived.
Coming to the phone. Its what you expect of a China build cheap phone. The battery compartment is too tight, it wouldn't come out so that I could add the sim. Touch response is terrible. But then 4G VoLTE at this price is difficult, unless someone can point me to a phone in this price category with 4G. So anyone rushing to Jio but wants a sub-5k (I think price will drop) will have to go with this. Otherwise use Jio Join.
After continuous pestering the SM was finally able to upload the docs after 24hrs. Order with Jio was placed. It took another 24hrs and more pestering for the SM to approve my CAF and forward to tele-verification. Once the verification was done, sim got activated in couple of minutes (total 48hrs).
The first thing I noticed after adding the sim to the Lyf phone was the signal was next to non-existent. Tried a speedtest and it kept connecting to Latur with below 1Mbps speed. Tried rebooting and adding sim to sim slot2 to no avail. So contacted Jio support whose first response was reboot the phone, take out and add back the sim to sim slot 1. Even after telling them that I have tried every reboot and sim slots, it fell on deaf ears. So tried doing that but nothing happened and I still got 1Mbps speed. They suggested getting Reliance NetVelocity app and the speeds were equally bad there. Later they opened a ticket for me to resolve the issue.
I took the phone outside on the balcony and got ~15-20Mbps fluctuating speeds, which again was not that great. So I went back to Jio support and had coverage in my area checked (which should have been the first step before getting the invite). Out of the EXCELLENT, GOOD and SATISFACTORY coverage, mine was "GOOD", they said. Nearest tower turned out to be ~1km away.
I did travel to couple of places, one of them being Phoneix MarketCity and found 40-50Mbps there (outdoors), indoors was just as bad. But when I travelled to office in Bellandur today, speeds were equally bad. Additionally when Jio tried to call me to resolve the earlier raised ticket, the call had no voice. They tried couple of times and each time had this issue. On a whim, I tried calling the Jio number from my office phone and got a "network congested" error. So its in beta and already congested.
So calls working only at home
Last point on the video apps. Jio Play has HD channels which played very well even on the shit 2Mbps speed. In comparison, I couldn't get Jio OnDemand to play any video even when I was getting 40Mbps in speed.
Here are some speedtests at my house compared with Airtel 3G, which for some reason shows up as Vodafone. While some might say okay Airtel has been in the game too long and has too many towers compared to Jio, the point here is to show Jio is not all awesome and sunny.
Btw, I figured how to change the server settings in speedtest so that I could run this against a Bangalore server instead of Latur:
Jio:
Airtel 3G:
In the balcony:
Jio
Airtel 3G:
Well, that does it. I was planning to get a Lyf since I need a new phone for a few months, and was thinking of switching to jio as well. Now will wait for a few months. Already my Moto E has gone into bootloop both OS and recovery.
Here's my review of the Jio network. Do note, I am kinda incensed by the speeds and coverage in this beta so take with a grain of salt.
@vaibhavyagnik was kind enough to share an invite after a lot of pms
The very first step was marred with issues, maybe due to yahoo id or something else. I have talked to others who got their invites and ~24-48hrs seem to be a standard. I got mine after 2.5 days, for god knows for what reason.
Walked into the nearby Reliance Digital with invite. After confirming the invite, store manager and me sat down to fill out the forms. The store manager said they have been trained for filling out the CAF and still tore up 3-4 CAF because he couldn't get the info right. There was confusion on if postpaid landline bill could be considered as PoA and what exactly will be the document number etc. He told me Jio will dock him money for every incorrectly filled CAF. Additionally, he wasn't aware of the Jio Money form, so I filled it out myself. This took 1.5hrs to complete. The store manager was candid enough to accept that this was not a timeline which a non-invite guy would want. Once in a while he suspected I was some kind of Reliance Jio inspector as I laid out information gleaned from forums
Once the form was filled out, it needed to be uploaded on the server. And it wouldn't happen no matter how many times it was tried. The store manager tried on store wifi, jio and I even shared my Airtel 3G. It just wouldn't work. Call to "senior Jio employee" was met with "server issue" as a reason. It was approaching 2hrs and SM (store manager) was kinda frustrated dealing with one customer, so he gave up and asked me to bill the phone. Docs can be uploaded later, he said. So I bought Lyf Flame 1, even though I wanted Flame 2 but the stocks had not arrived.
Coming to the phone. Its what you expect of a China build cheap phone. The battery compartment is too tight, it wouldn't come out so that I could add the sim. Touch response is terrible. But then 4G VoLTE at this price is difficult, unless someone can point me to a phone in this price category with 4G. So anyone rushing to Jio but wants a sub-5k (I think price will drop) will have to go with this. Otherwise use Jio Join.
After continuous pestering the SM was finally able to upload the docs after 24hrs. Order with Jio was placed. It took another 24hrs and more pestering for the SM to approve my CAF and forward to tele-verification. Once the verification was done, sim got activated in couple of minutes (total 48hrs).
The first thing I noticed after adding the sim to the Lyf phone was the signal was next to non-existent. Tried a speedtest and it kept connecting to Latur with below 1Mbps speed. Tried rebooting and adding sim to sim slot2 to no avail. So contacted Jio support whose first response was reboot the phone, take out and add back the sim to sim slot 1. Even after telling them that I have tried every reboot and sim slots, it fell on deaf ears. So tried doing that but nothing happened and I still got 1Mbps speed. They suggested getting Reliance NetVelocity app and the speeds were equally bad there. Later they opened a ticket for me to resolve the issue.
I took the phone outside on the balcony and got ~15-20Mbps fluctuating speeds, which again was not that great. So I went back to Jio support and had coverage in my area checked (which should have been the first step before getting the invite). Out of the EXCELLENT, GOOD and SATISFACTORY coverage, mine was "GOOD", they said. Nearest tower turned out to be ~1km away.
I did travel to couple of places, one of them being Phoneix MarketCity and found 40-50Mbps there (outdoors), indoors was just as bad. But when I travelled to office in Bellandur today, speeds were equally bad. Additionally when Jio tried to call me to resolve the earlier raised ticket, the call had no voice. They tried couple of times and each time had this issue. On a whim, I tried calling the Jio number from my office phone and got a "network congested" error. So its in beta and already congested.
So calls working only at home
Last point on the video apps. Jio Play has HD channels which played very well even on the shit 2Mbps speed. In comparison, I couldn't get Jio OnDemand to play any video even when I was getting 40Mbps in speed.
Here are some speedtests at my house compared with Airtel 3G, which for some reason shows up as Vodafone. While some might say okay Airtel has been in the game too long and has too many towers compared to Jio, the point here is to show Jio is not all awesome and sunny.
Btw, I figured how to change the server settings in speedtest so that I could run this against a Bangalore server instead of Latur:
Jio:
Airtel 3G:
In the balcony:
Jio
Airtel 3G:
keep pestering CC until you get resolution to the problem
They called me yesterday and for some reason Moto G3 (VoLTE) had no voice during the call. I talked to them today using the LYF phone. Even then I had couple of moments when there was no voice. They tried setting up APN and all to see if it resolved but the same speed issue persists. But finally they suggested Jio Bangalore team will get in touch with me. So fingers crossed.
In the meantime, I tried an app called NetMonitor to get a guesstimate on tower locations:
There are no towers on left side of the screen for quite a large area and the signal seem to be bouncing off pretty far off ones.
This compared to the screenshot of coverage they gave me:
They seem to suggest "good" but to me it looks more like "satisfactory" for quite a large area around me. So the resolution would require a tower or two
or redefining their coverage really.There have been stories of tickets being closed if they are raised about indoor coverage, hopefully they don't do that for me.
Edit: Man, whats with the constant server issues. I tried logging to myJio to check data usage and Homepage is blank with "Reload" button. All the balance/statement options are missing. seems the myJio server is having some issues.