Reliance Jio 4G services launch, still few months away

Quarter one results for Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) was widely awaited for clarity on the commercial launch of Reliance Jio 4G services. But the company says the test program will take months to upgrade into commercial operations. Which means it is going to be more waiting for the official launch of Jio’s 4G services.

Subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani led RIL, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL) claims that the company now has over 1.5 million test users on its network since their soft launch in December last year. The average monthly consumption per user is in excess of 26 GB and is increasing rapidly. Average voice usage per month is over 355 minutes.

There have been many reports on the launch of Jio's 4G services, latest one saying that Jio will be launching with its Freedom plan on the 15th of August; with free voice services and date priced at Rs. 80 for 1GB 4G data.

Looks like the focus for RJIL is not just launching their 4G services but the company is looking at creating a complete digital services business in order to offer end-to-end solutions in key domains such as education, healthcare, security, communication, financial services, government-citizen interfaces and entertainment.

With a quest to push digital content and their data services, the company is going big on "visuality" by looking at replacing voice with video as the new communication medium with a hope to create “one of the most comprehensive and powerful Video networks in the world.” The company has a communication app, Jio chat that provides video calling along with other services like voice calling, chat, conferencing etc.

RJIL has also joined global telecom operators like China Unicom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Singtel, T-Mobile US, Telefonica and Axiata Group for an initiative for a universal Rich Communications Services (RCS) profile worldwide. This initiative will provide a common universal profile which will enable these mobile operators to deploy an interoperable RCS implementation with a core feature set and configuration.

Over the years the company has been able to build a robust telecom infrastructure by participating in spectrum auctions and partnering with other telecom operators for spectrum and tower sharing. RJIL is the first telecom operator to hold pan India Unified License. It has total liberalised spectrum holdings of 846.10 MHz in various frequency bands including spectrum acquired from Reliance Communications Limited in 13 circles. The company can use all the available liberalised spectrum for rolling out services across all technology, 2G/3G/4G . In addition, RJIL has entered into agreement with RCOM for sharing of spectrum in the 800 MHz band across 21 circles. Only RJIL is using sub-GHz spectrum band for LTE services in the country today. Sub-GHz spectrum is the most trusted frequency for LTE services globally; with the help of 800zmhz spectrum the company deploy 4G services with lesser investment in infrastructure.

Image Source: Jio.com