Indian telecom operator Reliance Jio started the first phase of its “4G” network rollout. Employees of the disruptive telco will be the first to try the new service.
Reliance Comm is looking to shake up the world’s second-largest mobile subscriber market with the launch, taking on incumbent operators Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular. Billionaire entrepreneur and chairman of Reliance Jio Limited, Mukesh Ambani, believes there is a big opportunity to capitalize on the emerging mobile market.
“India is ranked around 150 in the Internet and mobile broadband penetration out of 230 countries. Jio is conceived to change this,” Ambani said during a launch party for the new service. “I have no doubt that with the launch of Jio, India’s rank will go up from around 150 to among the top ten in the next few years for Internet and mobile broadband penetration.”
The employee-only launch party, which took place in Mumbai, was attended by 35,000 employees and their families. During the event, Reliance went all out with its social media campaign to hype the launch, enlisting the help of Indian celebrities to make the hashtag #CelebratingJio become a trending topic on Twitter.
However, Mashable and others on social media have noticed an eery similarity between many of the celebrity tweets, claiming perhaps the sentiment is not wholly genuine.
Reliance Comm’s ambitious plan, which Ambani has already invested nearly $15 billion in, includes more than 100,000 macro sites, 150,000 small cell, more than 500,000 Wi-Fi access points and more than 234,000 kilometers of fiber to be deployed in the next three years. The company’s goal is to have more LTE subscribers than all of the the U.S. telcos combined in the next two years.
The small cell deployment is perhaps the most ambitious part of the plan. To meet the lofty targets, Jio created its own automated workflow that allows every employee to access small cell data from a tablet.
There has also been talks that Jio may merge its operations with competitor Aircel in a move to become the second-largest mobile operator in India behind Bharti Airtel.
