Monday, December 21, 2015

Reliance Jio to launch 4G services on 27 December








We are happy to share that we will unveil Jio to our colleagues first, on the eve of our founder chairmans 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 groups 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 Jios 4G services in Mumbai on December 27 at the soft launch of the firms 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.
  
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