According to Kiran Thomas, president, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Reliance Jio’s services are available in over 2,300 cities and towns. The operator is present today in more than 60,000 sites, which cumulatively means that it has deployed more than 350,000 5G cells across these 2,300 cities. This is by far the fastest 5G rollout of this scale anywhere in the world, according to Thomas.
Speaking during the analyst call for the company’s financial results for the quarter and year ended March 2023, Thomas said, “Largely driven by their superior proposition, in the cities where we have deployed 5G, we are already seeing that there is a great increase in consumption, sometimes as high as three or four times, even from a very high consumption base that we have with 4G. And even without any change in tariffs, what that means is that we can see we can anticipate a growth in average revenue per user (ARPU), just driven by consumption alone. And that’s on the mobility side. But if you look at what it means for Indian homes, as you all know, we have been rolling out JioFiber services, which is our optical fibre-based home broadband services, over the past more than a year or so. But with AirFiber, which is what we are calling our 5G broadband to the home through fixed wireless technology, we can really accelerate the growth of that home broadband base taking advantage of this pan India 5G network that we are rolling out. And looking beyond consumers’ homes, if you look at our enterprises and SMBs, the 5G services are powering not just connectivity, but a slew of software services which are now starting to bundle along with our 5G services and 4G services as we make more inroads into the enterprises. So, if you look at it, we can really imagine that 5G is really driving what we call the Jio 2.0 opportunity with the transformational impact that will have in mobility in home as well as in the enterprises.”
Further, Thomas informed about the recent launch of Jio Plus, a new post-paid offering by the telco. He said, “Post-paid traditionally has been a very strong market for the incumbent competitors in India. And what we are trying to do is really become more aggressive as we enter into this into this segment. What we are offering is a family plan, which allows essentially up to four people to share a single post-paid plan. That means you get a single bill for the entire family. You can share the data which is available as part of that combined post-paid plan that you have taken, which means less wastage.”
