Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani said the affordable JioPhone has been a runaway hit, with a massive 3 to 5 lakh Indians lapping up the lowcost 4G VoLTE phone every day to go digital.
Ambani said he had “mandated” (telecom arm) Reliance Jio’s young engineers to innovate the world’s most affordable 4G LTE smartphone since as many as 500 million Indians were still using low-cost feature phones and remained excluded from the benefits of the digital revolution. Something, that led to the advent of the JioPhone.
“The result has been stunning: 300,000-500,000 Indians are daily migrating to the JioPhone to access high-speed internwhile their existing voice needs are completely free,” said Ambani. He was speaking at an event in London Thursday evening.
The JioPhone, which was launched by Jio’s sister company, Reliance Retail, comes for a Rs 1,500 deposit, refundable after three years on return of the device. To avail themselves of the refund, subscribers need to recharge for a minimum Rs 1,500 a year, or a minimum Rs 49 a month. The phone is key to telecom new entrant Jio’s quest to increase its 160 million user base amid stiff competition from India’s top telcos such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular.
Ambani said Jio, which has become the biggest game changer in India since its launch in September 2016, was his daughter Isha’s brainchild when she was a student at Yale University in the US. The idea of Jio, he said, “was first seeded by my daughter, Isha”, in 2011. “Isha was home for holidays and wanted to submit some coursework, and she said, Dad, internet in our house sucks,” Ambani said reminiscing on how Jio was conceived.
His son, Akash, he recalled, had then captured the generation gap further by noting that while “telecom was voice in the old world, in the new world, everything was digital”, and that one could do a lot more with a digital network than just talk. Isha and Akash, Ambani said, belong to “India’s young generation that is far more creative, ambitious, and far more impatient to become best in the world”. “These young Indians convinced me that broadband internet is the defining technology of our age, and India cannot be left behind,” said Ambani. The RIL chairman said Jio had created the world’s largest greenfield 4G-only LTE data network that would make “India a leader in 4G in 2019”, adding that the network is also “5G-ready”.
Taking a veiled dig at rival incumbent carriers, Ambani said the combined Indian telecom industry took 25 years to build a pan-India 2G network, while Jio “took just three years to build a 4G LTE network which is much larger and far more advanced”. Jio, he said, had made high quality data available at the lowest price in the world, “at almost onetenth the prices in the US”.
Within the next few years, Jio, he said, “would empower the equivalent of two-thirds of Europe’s population to enjoy world-class digital services in India”. With its abundance of youthful talent, India, he said “is poised to become the third largest economy by 2028, within a single decade”. Ambani said India would also be among the first to “graduate to the Internet of Everything”, especially as internet becomes accessible to all Indians.
While the “internet of communication, content and commerce” existed, the coming years, he envisioned, would ring in the era of “an internet of intelligence that would power nextgen smart services, an internet of energy that would be the foundation of India’s energy security and an internet of trust that would create a framework for distributed transactions and contracts without intermediaries”.
