Reliance Jio Infocomm has, for a long time being touted as the next big thing in the mobile and telecom sector in India. The Mukesh Ambani-owned mobile company has acquired a pan-India 4G license in October 2013 and is busily preparing forrollout of its high-speed, multi-media digital services spanning education, healthcare, entertainment, financial and cloud services among others. The first of these services over 4G is scheduled for market launch in September, this year.
The Reliance Industries Owned Company has showcased many new offering at IIT Bombay’s (IIT-B) Techfest and one among them was TV on mobile. Video on demand and live TV in High Definition are touted to be one of the biggest offering from RJIL. Also, on demo was catch-up TV that eliminates the need to record favorite shows as the service allows you to view seven days of stored content for each of its over 100 channels, at your leisure.
RJIL’s Market Presence:
Apart from the strategic alliance that’s been finalized with Reliance Communications, the other key things in place include key agreements with other technology partners, service providers, infrastructure providers, application partners, device manufacturers and other strategic partners. The latest agreement that RJIL is secured is a Master Services Agreement to use Viom Networks’ pan India passive telecom infrastructure that has a footprint of over 42,000 telecom towers. “This agreement is in line with our mission of a pan India launch spanning next-generation voice and data services and leveraging existing telecom infrastructure,” said Sanjay Mashruwala, Managing Director, RJio in a statement after announcing the agreement in March 2014.
Perhaps the biggest news that came out from the RJIL camp was the agreement signed with Bharti Airtel in which the companies agreed to share infrastructure created by both parties. This includes optic fibre network – inter and intra city, submarine cable networks, towers and Internet broadband services as well as other such opportunities identified in the future. The arrangement could, in future, be extended to roaming on 2G, 3G and 4G, and any other mutually benefiting areas relating to telecommunication.
On an international front, Reliance Jio is a part of the Bay of Bengal gateway cable system that connects Middle East, South Asia, Europe and South-East Asia.
4G Devices:
RJIL can grow exponentially only when low cost 4G devices hit the streets. And that is something that still needs to fall in place for RJIL. Reportedly, RJIL has been talking to Korean major Samsung and Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei to explore providing compatible handsets to be bundled with the service at affordable India-market price points. Many analysts believe that devices priced along the 6k mark would pave the way for consumers to switch to RJIL and embrace a digital revolution.