Everything you wanted to know about Mukesh Ambani speaking on Reliance Jio

Reliance Jio always manages to grab attention with promises taller than the Great Khali — it’s a different matter altogether whether they manage to live up to the lofty claims.

In an event today (February 21), which was broadcast live on Facebook, chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani said Jio will start its tariff plans from April 1 — a little ominous considering the date and Jio’s failure to live up to its promises of becoming India’s one-stop shop for a 4G network.

But jokes aside, from a strictly business perspective, Jio has enjoyed an unprecedented amount of success. “Reliance Jio has crossed 100-million customers’ mark in just 170 days,” Ambani said, at the press conference. But Jio’s customer base is no measure for its product quality. With more people joining, the speed of the service has taken a hit. For a company that promised the fastest 4G service in the country, it proved to be one of the worst, according to TRAI data. To top it all, its coverage is still somewhat patchy.

Here are the important takeaways from the conference.

1) Ambani announced that Reliance Jio will begin tariff plans from April 1, after the Jio Happy New Year Offer expires on March 31. Jio's mobile plans (both postpaid and prepaid) will continue to include free voice calls indefinitely.

2) Jio plans to offer a Jio prime membership programme for its first 100-million customers. The new Jio Prime subscription plan that will provide them the same free calls, data and other services they received under the Happy New Year plan at a price of Rs 10 per day (Rs 303 per month).

3) According to the Reliance chairman, Jio has added 7 customers every second in a day on an average and has clocked 200 crore minutes of voice/data since they began and over 100 crore GB a month.

4) “We are making our network better, faster, stronger with each passing day,” he said. “We will more than double data capacity. By the end of 2017, Jio network will be present across India—cover 99 per cent of our country’s population,” said Ambani. 

According to an India Today report, Jio's coverage is still somewhat patchy. Although here too the company has improved, but the problem for the Jio network are the big buildings. Inside shopping malls etc, its coverage doesn't seem as robust as that of Airtel.

5) Before Reliance Jio, India ranked 150th in terms of mobile penetration, but that has now changed to India being in the first position for mobile data usage, claimed Ambani. “Today India is the number one country in the world for mobile data usage. Jio users consume as much mobile data as the US and nearly 50 per cent of all of China. A significant portion of this data is consumed by video — 5.5 crore hours of video daily — making Jio one of the largest video networks globally,” he said.

Also read - Even as the 5G logo gets finalised, India still struggles with 3G and 4G