NEW DELHI: Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom service provider, is set to launch Jio AirFiber, a fixed-wireless broadband service, on September 19 in the country, said Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani while addressing the 46th annual general meeting (AGM) of shareholders on Monday. The company aims to provide 150,000 connections per day with Jio AirFiber, in comparison to 15,000 connections daily with optical fiber.
“Jio AirFiber uses our pan-India 5G network and advanced wireless technologies to bypass the need for last-mile fiber. Through optical fiber, we can currently connect around 15,000 premises daily. But with Jio AirFiber, we can supercharge this expansion with up to 150,000 connections per day,” Ambani said.
He further said that Jio 5G is already present in over 96% of the census towns in the country. And the company has no track to cover the entire country by December 2023 this year. “This makes Jio 5G the fastest-ever 5G rollout of this scale anywhere in the world. Today, nearly 85% of the total 5G cells operational in India are in Jio’s network. At our current pace, we are adding one 5G cell to our network every 10 seconds, and we will have nearly one million 5G cells operational in our network by December,” said Ambani.
While talking about Jio, the RIL chairman said that telco has become the preferred choice for mobile users. The number of net port-ins via Mobile Number Portability is five times that of the nearest competitor (read Bharti Airtel). The company boasts over 50 million 5G customers and aims to migrate its entire 4G customer base to 5G with minimal additional capital expenditure. He also highlighted that the company will start deploying Jio 5G broadband connection across the country from December 2023. “We know that every home, small and medium businesses, factories, schools, and hospitals across India would like to have 5G. From December this year, we will be able to promptly fulfill every demand for Jio 5G broadband connection across the country,” he added.
He also mentioned that the company recently used its own 5G stack to become the first operator in the world to launch commercial services on millimetre-wave spectrum, using Standalone 5G. This high-capacity, low-latency layer will significantly enhance private 5G, home broadband, and enterprise use cases.
Jio has also built its own low-power small cells to go deeper into specific pockets of high consumption, like tourist spots and temples, in a highly energy-efficient manner. “These advantages, along with our massive scale of deployment, mean that the best 5G coverage, capacity, and experience is possible only with Jio 5G,” said Ambani.
He also mentioned that when the company launched its 4G services in 2016, it relied on global partners for equipment. Today, its 5G rollout is powered by Jio’s own 100% in-house developed 5G stack. “It features advanced technologies like Standalone 5G architecture, Carrier Aggregation, and Network Slicing, with advanced AI/ML capabilities that optimise our vast network for unparalleled quality, reliability, and user experience. And it is designed to seamlessly integrate with the 4G and 5G equipment from other global vendors,” he added.