Hands-on Jionet Wi-Fi at Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru

By Deepak Kumar

Admittedly, this is a bit late. Reliance JioInfocomm, the country’s potentially largest greenfield LTE service provider, had deployed Wi-Fi at as many as six stadia during the T20 World Cup itself that concluded in early April this year.

So when a few days ago, I got this call from my Editor friend Nandita Singh at telecom business magazine Voice & Data, it wasn’t particularly enthusing. “Would you like come over for a joint review of RJio’s Wi-Fi network at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, while the IPL match between Royal Challengers and Knight Riders is on?”she asked.

Add to it the fact is that I ceased to be an avid cricket watcher quite some time back. Also, the RJio’s 4G LTE launch has been so much delayed and so this Jionet (that’s what RJio’s Wi-Fi offering is called) appeared like a side dish when the main dish is not yet served.

And yet, while either of the two things -- an IPL event or a Jionet Wi-Fi installation--may not be compelling enough in their standalone rights, the combination did look attractive...no wonder that the mobile industry has long mastered the art of bundling. The phenomenon of even a cross-section of a 40,000-strong user base (Chinnaswamy stadium has the capacity to seat those many people) trying to get into the Wi-Fi network in one location and mostly at the same time was worth observing! How would the network respond as a large number of people would take pictures, including selfies, and send those out as their Facebook and Twitter posts?

I got interested.

Here is a first-hand account of how it went for us as users.

At the outset, we decided to use as many access devices and operating systems as possible to test the network. An HP Pavillion notebook running Windows 10, a Lenovo Yoga running Windows RT; a Chromebook; a Google Nexus phone running Android; a Nokia Lumia phone running Windows; and a Micromax device running Android.

However, a few hours ahead of the event, we got to know that laptops and tablets were not allowed inside the stadium (quite obviously, for security reasons). What a pity! I had to actually go out of my way to drop the notebooks at my home-office before I could head to the stadium. We managed to get inside about 20 minutes before the match started but this was not good enough. Let me tell you why, but in a while.

Yes, we did manage to test the Jionet network but not before the network could test our patience (it took us close to 30 minutes to get logged into the network)!  In turn, let me not test your patience and come straight to the results first, before moving on to share other related experiences and observations.

The speed was awesome, overall that is. There were instances when at a download speed of 8+ Mbps and upload performance of around 2 Mbps, Jionet appeared to be only as good as what a competitor’s 4G LTE service normally offers. However, for most of the time we stayed there (about two hours), the speed was significantly better.

As you can see by clicking here (a new tab will open), we could achieve a download speed almost as high as 27 Mbps and an upload speed of up to 14.69 Mbps from two of the other speed tests that we conducted. The device used was a Nokia Lumia 525.

Prior to this, we happened to interact with an RJio person, who also ran a test for us on his device (I suspect it was an LYF phone). His phone tested a download speed of 5+ Mbps and an upload speed of over 7 Mbps. Yes, that’s right -- the upload speed was higher than the download speed. When we asked him if that wasn’t a bit strange, he said it was configured that way on purpose, since during the match the spectators were more likely to be sending out stuff than receiving it.

That sounded quite logical, though when we ran the three aforementioned tests later, we always got the download speed as much higher than the upload speed. But then yes, the upload speed too was also mostly remarkably high, which does mean that the network was provisioned to yield higher-than-usual upload speeds. And indeed, many of the spectators were taking selfies along with their friends and families and understandably, happily enough, uploading those to their respective social media accounts.

We played a number of YouTube IPL videos, among others, and everything seemed to work fine. However, we did experience a slower performance when we ran the regular browser. It was miserably slow to view the same YouTube video through the browser, even when it ran flawlessly when viewed through the YouTube app. General web browsing was fast enough, if not exceptional. The one thing we noted was that all the elements of a page didn’t load simultaneously but with some lag, which seemed a bit unusual for a connection that exhibited such high speeds.

Other regular tasks, such as sending mails and checking WhatsApp messages worked seamlessly for me as well as others (we spoke to a few co-spectators and they expressed satisfaction with their respective Wi-Fi links).

But all the testing that seemed to end well, didn’t start equally well, and we did experience more than a fair bit of problem while logging into the Jionet Wi-Fi. And that’s where it probably mattered to reach not just 20 minutes ahead of the match but preferably more--maybe 40 minutes to 60 minutes in advance. I say so because by the time we reached, more than half of the stadium was easily full and many people were trying to log into the Jionet network simultaneously, which appeared to be partly responsible for our login delays.

Talking of the login process, it required a user to enter one’s mobile number on a Jionet interface and seek a verification code, which would come through an SMS via the user’s mobile service provider network. Apparently, there was some interconnect at play between Jionet and say, an Airtel, a Vodafone or a BSNL network, and there seemed to lie a bottleneck. For us, the verification code took almost 30 minutes to arrive, despite repeated tries. It also came on only one of the three phones that we carried. For the other two devices, it never arrived, and therefore, we couldn’t test the network on those two Android devices.

My understanding of the issue is that the OSS/BSS elements responsible for the interconnects with other mobile networks were not yet fully calibrated.( This seems to be true not just of the Jionet but RJio’s networks in general. No wonder, when I tried calling the RJio person the next day, the call never went through. However, my message to him over WhatsApp got delivered.)

I wanted to ask him about the infrastructure deployed at the stadium, including the number of access points, their technological specifications (802.11 n or ac?), make, and so on. Unfortunately, he got caught up in back-to-back meetings and wasn’t available till the time of writing this post. Some other time maybe…

Nevertheless, we estimated that there were around 700 access points (APs) installed at the stadium. Also, given the speeds these APs were able to support for hundreds to thousands of user simultaneously, one could safely expect those to be 802.11ac based devices.

BTW, Virat Kohli-led Royal Challengers lost that match by five wickets despite having put up no small a total of 185.

(The author Deepak Kumar is a market researcher and strategic business advisor, and founder analyst at B&M Nxt.)