Reliance Jio services launched for employees

Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom venture of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) on Sunday, launched its 4G services for its employees, ahead of the full commercial roll-out in March 2016.

Reliance Jio offers 4G LTE connectivity for data and voice, currently the fastest and latest generation of cellphone network coverage. Reliance Jio’s full-scale commercial launch will be a pan-India one, offering only 4G LTE connectivity. Jio will not revert to older technologies like 3G or 2G unlike other players in the market.

Here are five things you need to know about Reliance Jio’s 4G internet. 

1) Reliance holds the 2300 Mhz spectrum across the country, 800 Mhz spectrum in 10 circles and 1800 MHz spectrum in 6 circles. Reliance’s total investment is nearly Rs 34,000 crores. 

Airtel and Aircel also use the 2300 Mhz spectrum for deploying their 4G services in India. Vodafone and Idea are on the 1800 Mhz spectrum. However Reliance has the largest spectrum bank in the country, compared to any other operator in India and this puts Jio at a considerable advantage compared to other players. 

2) Reliance plans to offer its services through an all-LTE (Long Term Evolution) network. Voice services on Jio will be through VoLTE (voice over LTE), which allows for calls over the faster LTE network instead of regular voice networks. VoLTE promises higher call quality, along with faster video and multimedia services. 

3) Reliance Jio won’t just offer high-speed Internet with 4G LTE, but also look at 4G-enabled devices and creating an app ecosystem around its services. Smartphone-maker Intex and Huawei have tied-up with Reliance to launch Jio compatible devices. Reliance also launched , ‘Jio Chat’ that integrates chat, voice, video calling, conferencing, file sharing, photo sharing among others.  The company claims to have 1 million users already for Jio Chat. 

4) Reliance Jio has also laid more than 2.5 lakh kilometres of fibre-optic cables, covering 18,000 cities and over one lakh villages. The service claims to have an initial end-to-end capacity to serve in excess of 100 million wireless broadband and 20 million Fibre-to-Home customers. 

5) Reliance Jio will has also partner with State Bank of India to apply for the Payment Bank licence.  The company is working on its digital money and digital payment business strategy and Jio Money will try and provide secure, digital payments in India. 

6) According to a recent report by brokerage firm Credit Suisse, download speed on 4G network of Reliance Jio during its beta-test phase peaked at 70 MB per second but remained in 15-30 mbps range on most occasions. At 70 mbps speed, a full movie can be downloaded in about half a minute, while at 15-30 mbps the download time is about three minutes.