Reliance Jio Will Cover 99 Percent of India With 4G in 2018

The Mukesh Ambani-owned telecom operator is keen to push India from 2G/3G to 4G and gradually 5G.

Jio reported a standalone net profit of Rs 504 crore in the quarter.

(Photo: BloombergQuint)

Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio is aiming to cover 99 percent of the country's population by this Diwali, said a top company official. In addition to that, Jio has announced the rollout of Internet of Things (IoT) services in association with Samsung, as part of its expansion plans.

"We are deploying around 8,000 to 10,000 towers every month," said Reliance Jio Infocomm President Jyotindra Thacker.

He is hopeful that by September or October (Diwali), the reach of company’s 4G coverage would be 99 percent. At present, the company has a subscriber base of 160 million paid customers.

“We talked about acquiring 100 million customers in 170 days last year, which was unprecedented. People really doubted our ability to convert from free to paid customers,” said Tareq Amin, Reliance Jio Senior VP Technology.

Not only have we converted that, we have the largest migration of free to paid services in history. Our network today has 160 million paid subscribers in less than 16 months of operation.

Tareq Amin, Senior VP Technology, Reliance Jio

Amin further said that Jio's network would surpass 2G coverage. “Our coverage in LTE would surpass 2G coverage. We want to connect every person and every village," Amin said.

Talking about its objective in the IoT segment, he stated that Jio aims to work with the sectors like transportation, weather forecasting and agriculture. It is also exploring the possibility of working with third party developers on IoT.

On being asked about as how much time Jio would take to rollout IoT, Amin said the company needs to create an entire ecosystem for that.

Rather than of doing city-by-city launch, we would launch IoT always pan-India. We are not waiting for network readiness, but we are awaiting maturity of the IoT platform.

Tareq Amin, Senior VP Technology, Reliance Jio

If Jio can truly deliver on its promise of 4G network expansion, than existing legacy connectivity like 2G/3G could be gradually discontinued. This gives them ample time to focus on developing the tools to advance to 5G connectivity in the country.

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