During its Annual General Meeting (AGM) today, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) demoed its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service and gave us a few more details about it.
Jio Fiber services will start on 5 September. The base package is priced at ₹700 and offers 100Mbps speed. The service was announced last year, on 12 August, but the telco didn’t reveal details like data plans and real-time data speeds. Jio did offer the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service to early adopters with the GigaFiber Preview Offer, but the service has a capped top speed of 100Mbps instead of 1Gbps speeds promised during its unveiling last year.
Jio Fiber’s cheapest data plan is priced at ₹700/month with speeds capped at 100Mbps.
The top-of-the-line package is priced around ₹10,000 per month with access to broadband, Jio Home TV and Jio’s IoT. Jio is offering landline services with all of its Fiber packages. Voice calling to any Indian operator would be free. “ISD calling tariffs would be 1/5th to 1/10th of industry rates. We are offering unlimited US/Canada pack at ₹500 per month,” said Ambani.
Ambani also introduced Jio Forever Plans that will give users an HD or 4k LED television and 4k set-top box for free. “We are calling this the Jio Fiber Welcome Offer. I invite all of you to make the most of our Welcome Offer, and sign up for Jio Fiber as soon as it is available in your neighbourhood.” Complete tariff information would be available on 5 September.
Akash Ambani and Isha Ambani said the speed of the network ranges between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. They also talked the various applications of the service ranging from digital TV to cloud gaming. Reliance also talked about its mixed reality (MR) start up Tesseract. MR has many use cases including virtual shopping, education and movies. The Tesseract VR headset was also demoed.
Chairman Mukesh Ambani said Jio is signing up 10 million new customers every month. “The core and aggregation layers of our converge network are already 5G ready. Our wireless hardware is already 4G+ and can be upgraded to 5G,” he said.
According to the Reliance, Jio Fiber’s Preview service generated interest from 15 million people in 1,600 towns. Ambani said the services plans to reach more than 20 mill residences in 15 mill businesses in 1,600 towns. 5 lakh homes are on trial plans and each of these are using more than 100GB of data. “US has average internet speeds of 90Mbps, our base plan offers a higher speed” said Ambani.
Jio is also eyeing enterprise customers including small and medium businesses (SMBs) and large businesses with the service.
Ambani said “Jio Fiber will enable 2.4 mill SMBs with high-speed data connectivity.”
