Mumbai: Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani revealed in a virtual annual general meeting that Jio will launch Jio AirFiber, its fixed wireless access offering on 19 September. Jio, which has 50 million 5G users, shall have a pan- India coverage by December 2023. It will also be among the first globally to put 6G competencies in place, as per media reports.
The launch of Jio AirFiber comes on the heels of its rival, Bharti Airtel launching its own device commercially, and is anticipated to swell the former’s addressable market to over 200 million high-paying homes and premises, over the next three years.
Mukesh also brought out that “providing last-mile connectivity is a painstaking process in most parts of our country,” and that’s where the fixed-wireless broadband offering, Jio AirFiber, would play a role. Additionally, he pointed out that Jio has more than 450 million subscribers, say reports.
As of now, the pricing of the new offering is under wraps. The new service is expected help the telco multiply its connected premises to 1,50,000 connections per day, which is a 10-fold growth from 15,000 premises a day that optical fibre would allow.
Mukesh also underlined the in-house developed Jio 5G stack which possesses features like standalone 5G architecture, network slicing, carrier aggregation, and AI/ML capabilities.
Jio’s 5G customer has reached 50 million since the October 2022 launch, and Jio 5G is already present in over 96 per cent of the census towns of the country.
Reliance Jio chairman Akash Ambani also spoke about the telco building a ‘transformative platform’ which will alter the way Indian enterprises, small businesses, and tech start-ups work with the digital world.
He also announced the Jio True5G Developer Platform – a comprehensive platform combining the 5G network, edge computing, and a spectrum of applications and services.