“We are happy to share that
we will unveil Jio to our colleagues first, on the eve of our founder chairman’s Dhirubhai Ambani birth anniversary,” Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani
with his wife Nita Ambani said in an invitation letter to employees.
However,
the launch will be restricted to the group’s 80,000-odd employees and close partners, who are likely to get
up to five connections each, translating to as many as four lakh customers,
senior executives of the company said, on condition of anonymity.
The
services will be free for the first three months, the idea being to test the
network before it goes live across the country. Once the services are launched
commercially, employees will get billed. They will, however, have to buy their
own devices.
Oscar-winner
A R Rahman will ring in Reliance Jio’s 4G services in Mumbai on
December 27 at the soft launch of the firm’s telephony services. Chairman Mukesh Ambani and his wife Nita
Ambani have invited more than 25,000 employees of Reliance Industries and their
families for the soft launch on that day at the Reliance corporate office in
Navi Mumbai, according to people privy to the development. Bollywood actor Shah
Rukh Khan is expected to be at the event these people said.
The
launch event, which starts at 5.30 pm and will be telecast live to 1,000
locations across the country.
RJio has
already given subscriptions to its telecom-to-television service on smartphones
to more than 17,500 employees ahead of the launch, for them to use the services
and give feedback before it rolls out services to the public early next year,
these people said. The company will now extend this offer to its other
employees, vendors and partners, they said.
Earlier
this week, analysts at Bank of America Merill Lynch and Credit Suisse said in
separate notes to investors that phone calls and data services on the network
were working well.
“The network coverage was on
par with incumbents we visited shopping malls,
office buildings, marketplaces, train stations. Even while travelling at high
speed, the signal was good without any drops,” analysts at Credit Suisse reiterated after testing the networks. “Overall, our take away is that the RJio network is turning out to
be as strong a threat to incumbents as we had feared.”
Reliance
Jio holds the highest amount of liberalized spectrum among telecom operators
which can be used for deploying any technology for mobile services. It has a
total of 751.1 MHz spectrum across 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2300MHz bands.
According
to field trials by brokerage firm Credit Suisse, download speed on 4G network
of Reliance Jio during its beta-test phase peaked at 70 Mbps but
remained in 15-30Mbps range on most occasions.
Data Pack:
Reliance
Jio is expected to price 10 GB 4G data pack at around Rs 600 per month, which
is almost 60% cheaper than similar plans from Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India,
RTN Asia reported.
India's
leading carrier Airtel's 10GB of 4G data is priced at Rs 1,350, while Vodafone
charges Rs 1,500 for similar pack.
With the
disruptive pricing, Reliance Jio Infocomm's 4G services could pose the biggest
threat to Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India's market share as their large
premium user base could be early adopters of the highspeed broadband services
that Mukesh Ambani's company will offer, brokerage CLSA recently said.
0 comments: