Reliance Jio Says It Has 108.9 Million Subscribers, Confirms Home Broadband Trials

Reliance Jio user base stood at 108.9 million on March 31, as per a regulatory filing by Reliance Industries Limited. This figure shows a marginal rise in the company’s customer base since February, when it announced that it had breached the 100 million-users mark. Since the announcement in February, Jio has launched offers to turn its free users into paying customers via ultra-low cost data plans, and other freebies. The filing says, “It crossed 50 million subscribers in just 83 days, and 100 million in 170 days, adding at an average rate of 6 lakh subscribers per day.” Jio also revealed that its users consuming 110 crore GB of data per month and make roughly 220 crore minutes of voice and video calls 220 crore a day. The company says its users are today consuming nearly as much data as on all the mobile networks in the USA and 50 percent more data than mobile networks in China, which it takes as “a clear indication that India will adopt digitisation and digital life faster than anyone else in the world.” Talking about hardware products, 2.6 million Lyf-branded smartphones and JioFi pocket routers were sold by the Reliance Retail unit in the January-March period. The total sales of the hardware products are close to 10 million units, the filing says. Reliance Jio is also working on the roll-out of its Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband service, and has started beta trials in some locations. It also said the scope of beta trials would be expanded over the next few months. Regarding network strength and reach, the Reliance Industries regulatory filing says, “Jio has the world’s largest greenfield 4G LTE wireless broadband network, with over 100,000 mobile towers, and it will add another 100,000 towers to the network in the coming months.” Reliance Jio claims that in the past quarter, it continued to solve its interconnection congestion issues with the leading telecom operators, and there has been noteworthy improvement in local access in recent weeks. However, National Long Distance (NLD, essentially STD) interconnection remains an issue in some service areas, it added.