About two years since Reliance launched its ambitious 4G VOLTE telecom service under Jio, it has been able to attract 215 million customers, and data and voice usage has more than doubled on its network. The launch of Jio disrupted the market as its free voice-calls and low data charges forced incumbents like Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone to follow suit and match Jio on the pricing front.
With Jio establishing itself strongly in the market, Reliance is now getting ready to usher in a big change in fibre optic broadband internet in India. To be called JioGigaFiber, the company promises to deliver a much superior experience to broadband internet consumption at home and corporate offices.
"Optical fiber-based fixed-line broadband is the future. Fixed-line broadband offers hundreds of megabits, even gigabits per second of data speeds. Jio is determined to move India to among the top five in fixed-line broadband, too," Mukesh Ambani told shareholders at the 41st annual general meeting on Thursday.
Reliance has already invested more than Rs 250,000 crore for creating the digital infrastructure to provide mobile and broadband connectivity across the country.
It will now extend this fiber connectivity to homes, merchants, small and medium enterprises and large enterprises simultaneously across 1,100 cities to offer the fiber-based broadband.
Beta trials of the broadband service are currently being conducted across "tens of thousands of homes," said Ambani.
From August 15, people can start registering their interest in JioGigaFiber via jio.com and the MyJio application. "We will prioritise our JioGigaFiber roll-out to those localities from where we receive the highest number of registrations," added Ambani.
The fibre broadband service will enable viewing ultra high definition entertainment on TV through JioGigaFiber, multi-party video conferencing among other things. One would also be able to control security cameras and home appliances through their smartphones.
The broadband service will also be available for small merchants as well as large corporate houses.
Meanwhile, the JioPhone, launched last year, ushering 4G connectivity on feature phones, will now get a more expensive sibling. The JioPhone 2 will come with a horizontal screen and a full keyboard and will be priced at Rs 2,999.
Reliance today is also among the largest retailers in India, operating over 7,500 stores and a revenue of around Rs 69,000 crore last year.
What though could be a game changer is its big plans to integrate its 4G and broadband network, Jio's customer base and the huge network of independent small neighbourhood retail stores to take on the big e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart. This is a part of Reliance's plan to transition to become a technology platform company, and create a hybrid, online-to-offline 'new commerce.'
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"This platform will bring together 35 crore and growing customer footfalls at Reliance Retail stores, 21.5 crore Jio customers, the targeted five crore JioGiga (broadband) homes and all the three crore small merchants and shopkeepers, who provide the last-mile connectivity," said Ambani.
The small shopkeepers could become key customer interaction and fulfilment points in this commerce push.
Through the company's mobile and broadband data and deployment of merchant point of sale terminals for small shop owners, Reliance claims it will enable the small merchants to compete better with larger enterprises and e-commerce players.
Apart from the commerce platform, Reliance also announced plans to launch an agriculture platform, education platform and a healthcare platform.