Reliance Jio is building an ecosystem in India for its Jio Bharat internet-enabled phones comprising multiple original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who are undertaking design, assembly and supply chain-related activities.
Speaking during the recent earnings call, Kiran Thomas, president, Reliance Industries Limited, said that Jio has adopted a unique go-to-market strategy that can help deliver the device at a sub-Rs 1,000 price point. He added that Jio Bharat has been received well in the past few days and the telecom company wants to quickly deploy about a million of these devices through its own offering as well as through OEM partners.
Additionally, Thomas noted that Jio’s net subscriber additions have been steadily rising on a sequential basis since the operator began its 5G roll-out in October 2022. He added that the subscribers are going even from a retention perspective and net port coming in from other operators, all this being driven by the superior quality that is being established through both the 5G and 4G deployments which are underway.
Further, Thomas stated that Jio has created a dedicated 5G network slice for its 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) solution, Jio AirFiber. In a way, the company has created two lanes in its 5G highway, one dedicated to the home roll-out, AirFiber, and one still continuing to serve its 5G mobile customers. He said that JioFiber is driving nearly 80 per cent of net new wireline subscriber additions in the country on account of competitive and innovative tariff plans. This has led to nearly 50 per cent year-on-year growth in the subscriber base. Also, nearly 98 per cent of the new additions are coming on the postpaid plan, which means a higher quality customer base as well as higher stickiness.
As per Thomas, Jio has expedited its wired broadband network roll-out by partnering with local cable operators (LCOs). Besides, the telco is upgrading its Wi-Fi home gateway to Wi-Fi 6 to improve indoor coverage, while enabling single-sign-on for streamlining access to over-the-top (OTT) media applications. He added that Jio is augmenting its network operators centre and service operations centre to proactively address and remediate connectivity issues related to broadband, Wi-Fi and set-top-box.
