As Reliance Jio turns three, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and MD of Reliance Industries has made a host of announcements, including the commercial launch of its much awaited broadband service: JioFiber.
At Reliance Annual General Meeting on Monday, the company announced that Jio was 10 million customers every month. The company claimed to be the second-largest operator in the world. The company announced that it has a total user base of 340 million. "Half a billion customers is well within our reach," Ambani said.
Here are the top announcements made by Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Limited:
New revenue engines
The company announced that its mobile broadband has been profitable from its first quarter and that it was now ready to kickstart four new revenue engines for the company: Internet of Things (IoT), home broadband services, enterprise broadband, broadband for SMEs, and expected revenues from these three engines to kick in this financial year. For IoT, the company said of the 2 billion estimated connected devices, the company aims to connect at least 1 bullion. Ambani says that this presents a revenue opportunity of Rs 20,000 crore.
JioFiber
Touted the next big disruption from Jio, Ambani announced that JioFiber services will be launched on a commercial basis on Sept 5, Jio’s third anniversary. The company said that it aimed to reach 20 million residences and 15 million business establishments in 1,600 towns. The company announced that the service, whose lowest plans will start at 100 Mbps and go up to 1 Gbps, will start at Rs 700 and go up to Rs 10,000. Jio fiber will come bundled with subscriptions to most premium OTT applications.
Jio also launched ‘Jio first day first show’: Every premium Jio Fiber customer will now be able to watch new movies at home the same day they are released in theatres. This service will launch in mid 2020
Home broadband was installed in 5 lakh homes on a trial basis, and it was found that they were consuming over 100 GB of data, and this was only going up.
Jio set-top box
Concerning television, Ambani announced that the Jio set-top box, will accept signals from local cable operators, and offer HD channels and was planning to rope in local cable operators. They would have features including video calling, voice search and unlimited premium content.
The set-top box will also support India's first multi-player gaming network, which supports all gaming controller. Making the announcement, Isha Ambani said that the gaming graphics would be at par with the best in the world, and would also support gameplay at 4k resolution.
“The experience of Jio Fiber and Jio set-top box really comes to life when combined with an LED television. So, Jio Fiber customers, who opt for our annual plans—which we call Jio Forever plans—will get an HD or 4K LED television, and a 4K set-top box absolutely free,” Ambani said.
Voice calling
Ambani also announced that voice calls from home to any Indian operator – both mobile and fixed line -- will be absolutely free forever.
Reliance also introduced tariffs for fixed line international voice calling, which Ambani termed as the end of an era of high international calling rates. Default tariffs will now be one-tenth of current rates. It also announced an unlimited US/Canada voice calling pack at Rs 500 per month.
Cloud infrastructure
With regard to cloud infrastructure, Ambani announced that RIL has entered into a long-term alliance with Microsoft to ‘accelerate digital transformation’. The company said it will establish data centers across the country, and Microsoft will bring Azure, its cloud computing service, to the data centres.
Jio also announced startup packages to offer cloud and connectivity services for free of cost to startups, which will be launched Jan 1, 2020.
Jio also plans to invest and financial support startups in education, skill development, agriculture, etc. It announced that it was investing 14 tech startups.
Apart from this, the company is also setting up a blockchain network across the country with 1000s of nodes. It is also setting up pan-India edge computing and CDN network.