Reliance Jio or RJio, a venture of Reliance Group of Companies was set up to provide 4G services in India is aiming to launch its services by the end of this financial year. The company aims to copy the tactics and strategies followed by the much successful China Mobiles.
Closing 2014, China Mobile, the state-owned enterprise managed to expand its consumer base to 807 million, a substantial growth of 5.1 per cent over the entire year. Company’s 4G customers are rounded to about 90 million. Company saw a growth in data services by 22.3 per cent while a decline of 13.1 per cent for voice services. The revenue from mobile data traffic went up by an eye-popping 42.9 per cent.
For China Mobile, LTE deployment was more an upgrade of existing 3G networks than deployment of new network technology. Romal Shetty, Partner and Head, Telecom Services at KPMG in India, claims that for China Mobile, 4G was merely an upgrade over the existing TDD 3G network. He further explained “One of the key reasons was that China Mobile was operating its 3G networks on Time Domain Duplexing (TDD) schemes. The LTE deployments were also TD-LTE. The main rivals of China Mobile (China Unicom and China Telecom) had the challenge of deploying TD-LTE networks while their 3G networks were predominantly Frequency Domain Duplexing (FDD) based. This advantage enabled China Mobile to provide extensive LTE coverage in shorter time frames as opposed to the competition.”
China Mobile was able to deliver excellent services on its TD-LTE network. As Rahul Agarwal, Senior Consultant, Information & Communication Technologies Practice at Frost & Sullivan informed, “Speed achieved by TD-LTE is much higher than what China Mobile achieved on its TD-SCDMA network and this has been critical for engineering the turnaround. China Mobile has experienced a surge in its TD-LTE subscriber base and looks good to continue doing well.”
Now following the same footprints to success, RJio is ready with its already purchased TD-LTE spectrum. Like China Mobile, RJio’s oil will be the mobile data traffic on the new network. China mobile deployed 720,000 4G base stations which now cover whole of the nation. RJio will have around 75,000 4G base stations at the launch time and it also have plans to double up its optical fibre coverage in next three years. Another problem which can become a hurdle to its success is the negligible amount of TD-LTE devices in India and a very less fraction of vendors providing the technology in recent devices. Thus the company intends to make available cheap devices to support its new network.
“Jio’s capacity created is more than the 4G network capacity in the US. We are trying to change the life of the individual,” says the RIL executive.
RJio will also come up with various services such as Jio Chat, Jio Beats, Jio Drive etc. This will add up to the data traffic for the company and also help offering rich content to the customers. It plans to have an end-to-end initial capacity to serve in excess of 100 million wireless broadband and 20 million Fiber-to-the-Home customers.