Mumbai, July 5 2018: Reliance Jio is to move beyond cellular netyworks to fixed line broadband, announced Chairman Mukesh Ambani today at the company';s annujal general meeting. The Jio brand of 4g Volte phones will see an improved model -- Jio 2 -- starting next month.
Other remarks of Ambani:
"We have doubled our customer base to over 215 million now, within 22 months of start: a record that no technology company has been able to achieve anywhere in the world.Data usage has grown from 1.25 billion GBs per month to more than 2.40 billion GBs per month. We were the world's largest mobile data network last year and the gap from the others has only widened in the last 12 months. Voice usage on the network has grown from 2.50 billion minutes per day to more than 5.30 billion minutes per day. The amount of video consumption has grown from 1.65 billion hours per month to more than 3.40 billion hours per month. We are on track towards achieving our target of 99% population coverage with 4G-LTE.
This means that Jio will be present in every district, taluk, gram panchayat and village of India. Over the past 12 months, we have more than doubled our network capacity. But even after serving the needs of our 215+ million customers, the capacity utilization of the Jio network is less than 20 %.
We have more than 25 million Jio phone userts India. The three most popular apps YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook will be available to all the JioPhone users from August 15.
JioPhone 2
We are now taking the JioPhone to the next level, with added capabilities and functionalities.. JioPhone2. Starting 15th August, our JioPhone2 will be available at an introductory price of only Rs 2999. It brings larger screen, a landscape mode and full keyboard.
Fixed broadband
India is ranked quite low at 134th in the global ranking for fixed broadband, Poor fixed-line infrastructure has been a key reason for this.Optical Fiber based fixed-line broadband is the future. We will now extend fiber connectivity to homes, merchants, small and medium enterprises and large enterprises to offer the most advanced fiber-based broadband connectivity solutions. Starting this Independence Day, August 15, customers can start registering your interest for JioGigaFiber through both MyJio and Jio.com. Reliance will prioritize the JioGigaFiber rollout to those localities from where we receive the highest number of registrations.
JIO GIGAFIBER will be the largest greenfield fixed-line broadband rollout anywhere in the world -- happening in 1,100 cities of India simultaneously.
Ambani scions Isha and Akash announced that Jio GigaFiber will be launched alomng with a host of smart devices for the home as well as router and TV set top box. Video calling via the TV is one application they highlighted.