Ten years ago, Jio promised India the cheapest data in the world. This month, the largest IPO that India has seen asked the investors to buy into what that promise had built. Between the launch speech of 2016 and the prospectus of 2026 lies a decade of deliberate sequence: make the gigabyte cheap, build the (data) habit, charge the habit.

On 21 October, Jio’s ₹302.13 billion IPO opened for bids. Ironically, just a month earlier, on 22 September, TRAI announced a new rule that the operators had opposed during consultation and that came into force at the same time as the IPO. This rule obliges every operator to sell calls-and-SMS only plans, priced below their data bundles, for validities of 30 days or less. These two events together perfectly bookend the contradictory journey that began with the promise of cheap prices in 2016 and just turned into a stronger per-customer revenue investor story.

What was promised

On 1 September 2016, Mukesh Ambani stood up at Reliance’s AGM and described data the way most companies describe a public good. “Data is the oxygen of Digital Life,” he said, “and oxygen must never be in short supply.” Its supply, he went on, “must never be unaffordable to any user.” He promised, “No Jio customer will ever have to pay for voice calls again.” The “22,000 tariffs” in the market were to be stripped back to about ten plans, without what he called “a forest of false choices”. The underlying claim was simple: “We have always put the customer first. And if this means changing the industry, then we are prepared to do so.”

Ambani also promised a 90% discount on the industry’s base rate, an effective ₹50 per GB, “the absolute lowest data rates anywhere in the world”. Elsewhere in the same speech however, he admitted that existing data packs already ran to an effective ₹250 per GB, and Jio would offer ₹25–50 depending on usage. So the discount was real but so was the hyperbole, as the famous 90% referenced a sticker price few actually paid.

In hindsight, it’s hard to differentiate whether it was a promise or a threat to change the industry but change it did. From ten-plus mobile operators in 2016, there are now three private ones, plus state-owned BSNL. The prices fell, but so did customer choice.

The patiently built habit

The cheap price unlocked usage that the company nurtured and built over a full decade. At launch, the average Indian mobile customer reportedly used under 0.2 GB of data a month. By June 2026, the average Jio customer used 43.7 GB a month, up 18% in a single year, according to the figures in the IPO documents. Cheap data changed how a billion people watched, paid, shopped. Jio undoubtedly played an important part, along with cheap Chinese smartphones, 4G coverage, short-form (social) video, UPI and Covid lockdowns, to build the online ecosystem in India. It propelled a habit it can now price afresh to fully unlock value for its investors, in an ecosystem where competition is limited.

The direction is unmistakable in the company’s own arithmetic. Average revenue per user rose 3.3%. Consumption has continued to grow faster than the cost, so that the gigabyte keeps getting cheaper even as the monthly recharge continues to creep up. And the impacted households are not quite likely to move away, held back by the silken threads from Jio’s sister companies.

Content in the pipes

A habit needed something to feed it, and the decade of cheap pricing was spent building exactly that.

First came the content. In February 2025, JioStar, the Reliance–Disney joint venture, merged JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar into JioHotstar, home of the IPL, ICC events and about 300,000 hours of entertainment, with subscriptions from ₹149 a quarter. Jio spent millions of dollars and many years streaming cricket free to hundreds of millions to teach the habit. Now Jio’s offer from May 2026 for prepaid plans above ₹349 a month, bundles a JioHotstar subscription into the recharge. The pipe sells the content; the content fills the pipe and the customer enticed by cheap data stays inside this walled garden of sport and shows.

There are other connecting pipes: payments through JioMoney and UPI, online shopping through JioMart / AJIO and the wider Reliance retail arm, each one making the monthly recharge a utility. The prospectus indeed owns this, calling it an “ecosystem” that an investor can make sense of. Because this is why the price of a gigabyte can keep falling while the value of each customer keeps rising.

No wonder that Akash Ambani can continue to claim to be on the side of affordability while promising in media interviews that, “We always have the ability to take prices up, but what we want to do is to really deliver more services to our customers so that they’re very happy, rather than just pricing per GB as a lever that we want to control”. In his Moneycontrol interview he adds, “We do not see network monetisation as being limited to charging more for every gigabyte of data. Tariffs are one component of the overall value proposition, but they are not the only means of improving the economics of the business.”

The two documents, the two promises

It’s interesting to specifically compare the 2016 speech alongside the 2026 prospectus filed with SEBI. One was written for customers, the other for investors.

The 2016 speech was built on the promise to customers for what they would stop paying. The 2026 prospectus tells investors how each customer will be made to pay more, including “tariff rationalisation” as one of the key drivers of future revenue per user. Its commissioned industry report projects industry mobile broadband revenue per user rising from ₹199.5 a month to ₹326.4 by 2030-31, about 64% higher.

The 2016 document celebrated customer-centricity; the 2026 one flags customer behaviour as a risk, since higher prices could push people to downgrade or switch. It records that the July 2024 rises lifted revenue per user while raising churn. “Political or public sentiment considerations,” it warns, “may create an environment in which tariff increases are difficult to implement”, which is ironical as it played a sizeable role in creating this environment that expects low prices. In 2016 the company was fighting unaffordable data. In 2026, it has put a price on a decade of affordable data, for investors to find value. In 2016 the free Welcome Offer was a tactic for entering a market. The 2026 prospectus lists rivals’ discounts and aggressive pricing as threats to its revenue, even as the challenger of 2016 now holds nearly half of India’s wireless broadband connections.

The 2016 launch led to the proud (but no longer accurate) “cheapest data in the world” claim across the decade. Cable.co.uk’s survey had ranked India the world’s cheapest in 2019 at $0.26 a GB and again in 2020 at $0.09; but in its latest survey India sits seventh at $0.16, after countries like Israel, Pakistan. Jio’s prospectus puts India at ₹7.5 per GB against ₹228.4 in the US. The Alliance for Affordable Internet measured affordability against income, rather than dollar prices alone. Its 2017 data showed that an entry-level 1GB prepaid plan cost 1.53% of average monthly income per person in India, against 0.40% in Sri Lanka and 0.95% in Indonesia.

The bargain, ten years on

In October 2019, Jio began charging for some calls, passing on the 6-paise interconnect fee for calls to other networks after TRAI deferred its plan to scrap the charge. Prices rose by up to about 20% in December 2021, when Jio followed Airtel and Vodafone Idea within a week, and by 12% to 25% in July 2024. Over those two rounds, Jio’s cheapest 28-day plan went from ₹129 to ₹155 to ₹189, for the same 2GB of data. In the four months after that hike, Jio lost close to 16.5 million subscribers by Nomura’s count. In August 2025 the 1GB-a-day plans were withdrawn, taking the effective entry point for a daily-data plan from ₹249 to ₹299. This year, media reports indicate that Jio cut its ₹195 pack from 90 days of validity to 30.

And on 17 August this year, ten years after its commercial launch, Jio brought back Prime. This time it costs a one-time ₹300, allowing a member to lock today’s price on their plan until 5 September 2027. Several brokerages see this as the shape of what’s to come: HSBC expects headline hikes around January to March 2027; Morgan Stanley pegs the rise at 16-20% this financial year; Centrum at 12-15% within months. Nomura called out that the likely reason Jio held back its price hike was to ensure it remained the leader by subscriber base at the time of IPO opening.

So, has the promise been kept, and does Jio still stand behind it? The answer, as in most cases, is complicated. There is real achievement - data prices fell, more than a billion users came onto mobile broadband, and the usage that followed, schoolchildren included, changed what ordinary households could do.

But the repurposing is also real. The cheap price was the means, not the end. The end was the habit: 43.7 GB a month. Customers can still switch, and after the 2024 rises millions did but what they cannot easily do is go without the habit, and the cricket, payments and shopping running through it, has made the connection a necessity.

The prospectus tells investors to count on each customer paying more every year, even as Akash Ambani promises continued affordability. Jio still draws its legitimacy to customers from its promise of affordable access, but it asks investors to value the ability to charge those customers more. It owes customers an explanation of what that promise means now.

* This piece first appeared on Minari Shah’s Substack page, The Long View